((((((((((((( Protein Spotlight Update: on the garden pea
)))))))))))))))
May 2014
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The life sciences owe a lot to green peas. And perhaps even to the
bishop of St Thomas Abbey in Brno - now the Czech Republic. It was
there, in the 1850s, that Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884) decided to
undertake studies on heredity using mice. The bishop, however,
disagreed with research involving animal sex, so his friar turned to
the more innocent garden pea. Mendel spent the best part of a decade
cross-breeding peas, while considering seven different phenotypic
traits that seemed - to him - to be inherited independently: stem
length, pod shape, pod colour, seed shape, flower colour, flower
location and plant height. Little did he know that the results he so
painstakingly jotted down, and which were published in 1866, would
bring about a small revolution in the world of biology - although only
in the first quarter of the 20th century.
http://web.expasy.org/spotlight/back_issues/159/
