((((((((((((( Protein Spotlight Update: on the garden pea ))))))))))))))) May 2014 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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/