ABSTRACT
Gregor Mendel was the first person to officially study heredity. Mendel's experiments provided the evidence to show that certain 'units of inheritance', as he called them, were responsible for passing on physical characteristics, or traits. Next, Mendel crossed the purebred purple-flowered plants with purebred white-flowered plants using cross-pollination. For peas, Mendel found that purple flowers were dominant over white flowers, yellow seeds were dominant over green seeds, smooth seeds were dominant over wrinkled seeds, smooth pods were dominant over bumpy pods, and tall plants were dominant over dwarf plants. Scientists eventually identified the genotypes of Mendel's peas. Mendel continued his work with dihybrid crosses. Mendel was curious, so he took two of the first-generation purple plants and bred them with each other. After performing monohybrid crosses, Mendel continued his work with dihybrid crosses. Plants are even easier to hybridize than animals, and they often reproduce better than either parent plant.
