Gregor Mendel, questions and facts

Gregor Mendel was born into an ethnic German family in Heinzendorf bei Odrau, Austrian Silesia, Austrian Empire (now Hynčice, Czech Republic). He was the son of Anton and Rosine (Schwirtlich) Mendel, and had one older sister, Veronika, and one younger, Theresia. He was christened Johann Mendel and given the name Gregor when he joined the Augustinian monks. They lived and worked on a farm which had been owned by the Mendel family for at least 130 years. During his childhood, Mendel worked as a gardener and studied beekeeping. Later on, as a young man, he attended gymnasium in Opava. He had to take four months off during his Gymnasium studies due to illness. From 1840 to 1843, he studied practical and theoretical philosophy as well as physics at the University of Olomouc Faculty of Philosophy, taking another year off because of illness. He also struggled financially to pay for his studies and Theresia gave him her dowry. Later he helped support her three sons, two of whom became doctors. He became a monk because it enabled him to obtain an education without having to pay for it himself. When Mendel entered the Faculty of Philosophy, the Department of Natural History and Agriculture was headed by Johann Karl Nestler, who conducted extensive research of hereditary traits of plants and animals, especially sheep. Upon recommendation of his physics teacher Friedrich Franz, Mendel entered the Augustinian St Thomas’s Abbey and began his training as a priest. Born Johann Mendel, he took the name Gregor upon entering religious life. Mendel worked as a substitute high school teacher. In 1850 he failed the oral part, the last of three parts, of his exams to become a certified high school teacher. In 1851 he was sent to the University of Vienna to study under the sponsorship of Abbot C. F. Napp so that he could get more formal education At Vienna, his professor of physics was Christian Doppler. Mendel returned to his abbey in 1853 as a teacher, principally of physics. In 1856 he took the exam to become a certified teacher and again failed the oral part.[9]In 1867 he replaced Napp as abbot of the monastery. Mendel began his studies on heredity at St. Thomas’s Abbey with mice, but his bishop did not like one of his monks studying animal sex, so Mendel switched to plants. Mendel also bred bees in a bee house that was built for him, using bee hives that he designed. He also studied astronomy and meteorology, founding the ’Austrian Meteorological Society’ in 1865. The majority of his published works were related to meteorology. Experiments on plant hybridization. Gregor Mendel, who is known as the “father of modern genetics“, was inspired by both his professors at the University of Olomouc (i.e. Friedrich Franz & Johann Karl Nestler) and his colleagues at the monastery (e.g., Franz Diebl) to study variation in plants, and he conducted his study in the monastery’s 2 hectares (4.9 acres) experimental garden, which was originally planted by Napp in Nestler, who studied hereditary traits in sheep, Mendel focused on plants. After initial experiments with pea plants, Mendel settled on studying seven traits that seemed to inherit independently of other traits: seed shape, flower color, seed coat tint, pod shape, unripe pod color, flower location, and plant height. He first focused on seed shape, which was either angular or round. Between 1856 and 1863 Mendel cultivated and tested some 29,000 pea plants (i.e., Pisum sativum). This study showed that one in four pea plants had purebred recessive alleles, two out of four were hybrid and one out of four were purebred dominant. His experiments led him to make two generalizations, the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment, which later came to be known as Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance. Mendel presented his paper, Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden (Experiments on Plant Hybridization), at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brno in Moravia on February 8 and March 8, 1865. It was received favorably and generated reports in several local newspapers. When Mendel’s paper was published in 1866 in Verhandlungen des naturforschenden Vereins Brünn, it was seen as essentially about hybridization rather than inheritance and had little impact and was cited about three times over the next thirty-five years. Notably, Charles Darwin was unaware of Mendel’s paper, according to Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man. His paper was criticized at the time, but is now considered a seminal work. #genes #chromosome #geneExpression #genome #Eukaryotes #Iherb #Eukaryotic #gametes #genomes #Prokaryotes #rRNA #nucleicAcids #genomics #MolecularBiology #doubleStrandedDNA #genotype #meiosis #GeneticsLecture #transcription #enzyme #DNAMolecule #geneticCode #gregorMendel #GeneticsExamQuestionsSolutions #GeneStructure #gene #phenotype #protein #Cancer #metaphase #Chromosomes #alleles #cytoplasm #mitosis #Genetics #dominant #DNA