Happy 200th birthday, Gregor Mendel: 5 ways the father of modern genetics impacted your life today – Clemson News

July 20, 2022July 20, 2022

Today is Gregor Mendels 200th birthday andcelebrationsare being heldall across the globe.

Why the fuss over anAugustinian monkfrom the 1800s who grew peas in the garden of the abbey where he lived?

Because breeding and studying those pea plants led Mendel to discover the fundamental laws of inheritance, earning him wide recognition as the father of modern genetics. Today, researchers from Clemson University and those across the world are using genetics in ways Mendel would never have dreamed for personalized medicine that tailors disease prevention and treatment, to breed drought- and disease-resilient crops, and to improve the health of agricultural crops and animals.

It all goes back to Mendel paying attention to what was happening right there around him. Mendel was the first person to really understand that traits can be quantified and inherited in a predictable way. Thats the foundation of genetics, full stop. Thats where it starts, said David F. Clayton, chair of the Clemson UniversityDepartment of Genetics and Biochemstry. Of course, in the years since, such great progress has been made in how that actually happens.

Back when Mendel started growing his pea plants, it was thought that traits in offspring were a result of a blending of traits of each parent, kind of like mixing paint.

Mendel studied seven traits of pea plants: seed color, seed shape, flower position, flower color, pod shape, pod color and stem length. He noticed when he cross-pollinated a pea plant with yellow pods with one that had green pods, he didnt get plants with yellowish-green pods. Instead, all of them were yellow. However, when that crop self-pollinated, 75% of the second generation were yellow and 25% were green. Mendel concluded that each individual had two complete sets of inheritable factors, one from each parent. He attributed that generation-skipping to some characteristics being dominant and some being recessive.

Since then, our knowledge of genetics has grown by leaps and bounds. After all, Mendel didnt know about genes or DNA, and sequencing of the human genome wasnt completed until 2003.

Today, genetics is all around us, woven into our daily live in small and large ways.

The Clemson University Center for Human Genetics and the College of Science will celebrate Mendels birthday with a lecture by Daniel J. Fairbanks of Utah Valley University on Sept. 2 at 2:30 p.m. The lecture, Gregor Mendel at the Bicentennial of his Birth: The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Genius, will be held on Zoom. It is part of the College of Sciences Discover Science Lecture Series.

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Happy 200th birthday, Gregor Mendel: 5 ways the father of modern genetics impacted your life today - Clemson News