Thursday, March 16 Throughout most of human history, the reasons why an organism looks like its parents were not known. This changed in the 1860’s when an Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel began experimenting with peas. Mr. Mendel wanted to find out how living things pass traits from one generation to the next. The traits that Mendel focused on were the height of a pea plant, color of the pea seeds, and the shape of pea seeds. He loved gardening at the monastery and he was very curious. By cross pollinating the pea plants himself, inside an enclosed greenhouse, Mendel carefully controlled which plants reproduced together, and tracked how each of these traits was passed from generation to generation. He used a cotton swab to gather pollen from the flowers of one pea plant, then swabbed the pollen onto the flowers of the second plant to be fertilized. When he cross pollinated two plants which had yellow pea seeds, to his surprise, about 25% of the offspring had GREEN seeds!

What type of reproduction is used by pea plants in Mendel’s experiment? SEXUAL ASEXUAL How do you know? What’s your evidence?

Write this question and the correct answer: 1. What is the best explanation for the reason green-seeded pea seeds were produced from two yellow-seeded parents? A. Both yellow-seeded parents were carriers of a recessive allele for green seeds. B. The coloring concentrated in the offspring, changing the seed color from yellow to green. C. An insect must have brought pollen from a green-seeded plant and pollinated the yellow-seeded plant. D. The green-seeded offspring were given more fertilizer, which caused them to “green-up”