State any two difficulties Mendel would have faced if he had carried his experiment on human instead of pea plants.
1 Answer
Mendel didn't perform his experiment in human beings because :
- Their lifecycle is too long
- They produce only one offspring at once. So, there would be difficult in comparison of the off springs
As it turns out, both pea plant height and human height (along with many other characteristics in a wide range of organisms) are controlled by pairs of heritable factors that come in distinctive versions, just as Mendel proposed. In humans, however, there are many different factors (genes) that contribute fractionally to height and vary among individuals. This makes it difficult to see the contribution of any one factor and produces inheritance patterns that can resemble blending. In Mendel's experiments, in contrast, there was just one factor that differed between the tall and short pea plants, allowing Mendel to clearly see the underlying pattern of inheritance.
In 1868, Mendel became abbot of his monastery and largely set aside his scientific pursuits in favor of his pastoral duties. He was not recognized for his extraordinary scientific contributions during his lifetime. In fact, it was not until around 1900 that his work was rediscovered, reproduced, and revitalized. Its rediscoverers were biologists on the brink of discovering the chromosomal basis of heredity – that is, about to realize that Mendel's “heritable factors” were carried on chromosomes.
Mendel carried out his key experiments using the garden pea, Pisum sativum, as a model system. Pea plants make a convenient system for studies of inheritance, and they are still studied by some geneticists today.
Useful features of peas include their rapid life cycle and the production of lots and lots of seeds. Pea plants also typically self-fertilize, meaning that the same plant makes both the sperm and the egg that come together in fertilization. Mendel took advantage of this property to produce true-breeding pea lines: he self-fertilized and selected peas for many generations until he got lines that consistently made offspring identical to the parent (e.g., always short).
Pea plants are also easy to cross, or mate in a controlled way. This is done by transferring pollen from the anthers (male parts) of a pea plant of one variety to the carpel (female part) of a mature pea plant of a different variety. To prevent the receiving plant from self-fertilizing, Mendel painstakingly removed all of the immature anthers from the plant’s flowers before the cross.
Mendel's work was not accepted by most scientists when he was alive for three main reasons: when he presented his work to other scientists he did not communicate it well so they did not really understand it. it was published in a scientific journal that was not well known so not many people read it.Still, Mendel didn't choose pairs of genes that were always on different chromosomes; some of the pairs of genes that Mendel studied were actually on the same chromosomes.
Mendel's work was not accepted by most scientists when he was alive for three main reasons: when he presented his work to other scientists he did not communicate it well so they did not really understand it. it was published in a scientific journal that was not well known so not many people read it.
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