The Better Breeding Blog Breed Better Animals

People have always understood that characteristics of parents can be passed to offspring. But how this was actually done was a mystery. One theory — the now defunct Blending Inheritance theory — held that progeny inherited an average, or blending, of… more »

This post will step through in greater detail all of Mendels results mentioned briefly in the It All Began With Gregor Mendel post. To recap, we know that he first established the following pure lines of garden pea: Seed shape: purebred round and… more »

From Mendel’s pioneering research on peas discussed here and here he devised three laws: The First Law: the law of segregation Mendel observed that inheritance was not some blend of parental characters. For example, the progeny from a purebred plant… more »

We know from Mendel’s experiments that each parent contains two copies of a ‘factor’ (gene). Let’s call these two copies a gene pair. We know from Mendel’s Laws that these gene pairs segregate and independently sort… more »

Last week I touched on mitosis, the process by which regular body cells replicate themselves, and meiosis, the process specialist cells undertake to produce gametes (the sex cells, sperm and eggs). Today I shall elaborate on mitosis and leave meiosis… more »