What is a pure breeding plant, and why was it important that Mendel use this type of plant in his initial experiments?
A pure breeding plant, also known as a true-breeding plant, is a plant that, when self-fertilized or cross-fertilized with another pure breeding plant, will produce offspring that have the same traits as the parents. These plants are homozygous for a particular trait, meaning they have two identical alleles for that trait.
It was important for Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, to use pure breeding plants in his initial experiments because they allowed him to observe and understand the principles of inheritance more easily. By using pure breeding plants, Mendel ensured that the traits he studied would be stable and predictable across generations, without the influence of other genetic variants. This allowed him to establish a clear pattern of inheritance and formulate his fundamental laws of inheritance.
Mendel worked primarily with the garden pea plant, Pisum sativum, which naturally had many pure breeding lines available. These lines allowed him to study different traits, such as seed color, flower color, and plant height, in a controlled manner. By observing the patterns of inheritance in these pure breeding plants, Mendel was able to uncover the fundamental laws of genetics, including the concepts of dominant and recessive traits, as well as the ratios in which traits are inherited by offspring.