Mendel carried out his second experiment in the monastery garden where he conducted his first. In his first experiment, he produced purple-flowered heterozygous pea plants when he crossed homozygous purple-flowered plants with homozygous white-flowered plants. In the second experiment, Mendel followed the color traits of the second generation of plants. Each of these plants contained the heterozygous gametes Aa.
Each of the heterozygous Aa plants created its own sperm and eggs. Half of the sperm cells received the dominant A allele, and the other half received the recessive a allele. The egg cells received the same pattern of distribution.
Mendel did not have to manually transfer the pollen this time. He allowed the pea plants to self-pollinate as they would in nature. In the process of self-pollination, the pollen falls on the carpels of the same plant. Mendel took the resulting seeds and planted them to grow a second generation of plants.
When the second generation, or F2, pea plants matured, Mendel discovered that there were both purple-flowered plants and white-flowered plants. Mendel concluded that the white factor in the F1 plants had been repressed rather than eliminated.
Question
How did the law of segregation contribute to the re-emergence of white flowers in the F2 plants?
Question
The outcome of the second experiment is that the white allele skipped the F1 plants and appeared in the F2 plants. Can you think of an example with humans when a trait skips a generation?