Why were peas used to study heredity?

Answer 1

1. it has a very short life span . say about 3-4 months.so it can show immediate results after the experiment.
2. it is a bisexual plant but sexual reproduction can be easily carried out.here it is also very easy to find a pure line.
3. moreover it has 7 pair of contrasting characters.

Answer 2

the garden pea is a good subject for studying heredity because

• it grows easly
• produces many offspring
• matures quickly
• several characters of peas exist in different formsand the male
• and female reproductive systems are inside the same flower

Answer 3

Gregor Mendel was a keen naturalist and gardener. He also was the abbot of the

Augustinian Abbey of St Thomas in Brno (nowadays in the Czech Republic), so he had enough authority to carry out experiments in their gardens.

He noticed that peas had certain characteristics or "characters" such as how high they grew, whether their flowers were red or white, whether the seeds were smooth or wrinkled, or green or yellow, and so on. When a pea shows a particular character, say red flower colour, we call that the red phenotype of the peas. Very importantly, Mendel noticed that there was not much sign of mixing of phenotypes. You didn't get half-wrinkled peas, or half-red flowers, or greenish-yellow pea seeds. Yes, you did get pink snapdragons as well as red and white, but not some pinker than others.

This was important because it showed that the characters were NOT like ink, that can be mixed any way you like; they were more like marbles. You could have one colour of marble, or another, but if you had a red marble and a white marble, that did not give you two pink marbles.

Now, the peas in Mendel's gardens had a number of characters that behaved like that. and Mendel noticed a lot of things about how the characters behaved. In particular he described several most important things:

Far and away the most important was the independentassortment of the inheritance of the genes. That meant that say, characters such as flower colour and the tallness of the plant each behaved as if the other did not matter. You could not make a flower redder or whiter by by making it taller or shorter. It was as though each plant inherited and passed on a token (actually two tokens, nowadays we call them genes) for tallness or shortness, and two tokens for colour. And whether you had tall tokens or short made no difference to whether you had red tokens or white.

Secondly, he discovered what we call the laws of segregation; there are particular rules for how those tokens get passed on. For example, if your pea plant had white-flowered parents, plants grown from its seeds would produce only white flowers, but there were different rules for certain examples of red flowers. This was perhaps the second most important thing he discovered.

Thirdly he found that if you took a red plant that produced only red flowers in its offspring (the plants growing from its seed) that is to say what we call a "true-breeding" red (or a homozygous red), and you crossed it with a white-flowering plant, you got only red flowers when you grew the seed, but the grandchildren of those pea plants gave both red and white flowers according to certain rules. When he discovered those rules in peas, he gave the rules a name, the rules of dominance. He said that red was dominant to white.

There was a lot more to it all than that of course, and we have discovered books-full about genetics since then, but it happened that peas were particularly suitable for such studies;

they produced at least one new generation per year, so that one could study the descendants of particular seeds, and crossbreed them to see what happened.

They had several characters that gave different phenotypes that one could easily tell apart.

Later we discovered far more complicated patterns of heredity in many different living things, but his basic idea of genes and how they work remains important to this day, and is one of the greatest discoveries in the history of Biology.

Incidentally, Mendel did some very clever experimental work in making those discoveries; the answers did not just appear magically on a cheat sheet that he could work from.

Answer 4

The pea plant (Pisum sativum) is a good choice for stuyding heredity because it:

A. Is easy to grow

B. Develops quickly

C. Produces many offspring

D. Has many traits that appear in two easily distinguishable forms

E. All of the above are correct

Answer 5

Garden peas are good subjects for studying heredity because they are simple. The traits if exhibited are easily seen and observed.

Answer 6

they are small,easy to grow, and a single pea plant can produce hundreds of offspring