Mendel's Law of Segregation: The Foundation of Genetics

What did Mendel find in his experiments with garden peas?

a. Thomas Hunt Morgan’s ideas of mutation.

b. Mendel’s law of independent assortment.

c. Mendel’s concept of nondisjunction.

d. Mendel’s law of segregation.

The answer is d. Mendel's law of segregation.

Mendel's law of segregation laid the foundation for understanding how traits are passed from parents to offspring and provided evidence for the concept of discrete hereditary units (genes) and their independent inheritance. It played a crucial role in the development of modern genetics and provided a fundamental understanding of the principles of inheritance.

Mendel's experiments with garden peas revealed that one physical unit (gene) is inherited from the father and one from the mother. This observation supported Mendel's law of segregation, which states that during the formation of gametes (sex cells), the two alleles (alternative forms of a gene) for a trait separate or segregate from each other and end up in different gametes. As a result, each gamete carries only one allele for a particular trait.