Question

How did Mendel come to work with pea plants?

Answer 1

Mendel selected a very simple biological system and further conducted methodical, quantitative analysis by using large sample sizes. Because of Mendel's work, the fundamental principles of heredity were given.

Complete answer:
While working with the garden pea plants, Mendel found that crosses between parents that differed by one trait produced F1 offspring that all expressed the traits of one parent. The observable traits are referred to as dominant, and non-expressed traits are described as recessive. When the offspring in Mendel’s experiment plants were self-crossed, the second filial generation offspring exhibited the dominant trait or the recessive trait in a 3:1 ratio, confirming that the recessive trait had been transmitted to the progeny from the original parent. Reciprocal crosses generated identical First filial and second filial offspring ratios. While examining these large sample sizes, Mendel did prove that his crosses behaved reproducibly and according to the given laws of probability, and also that the traits were inherited as independent events.
Gregor Mendel, through his work on the pea plants, postulated the very fundamental laws of inheritance. He also found out that the genes come in pairs and are inherited as distinct units, one from each parent. Mendel tracked the segregation of parental genes and their appearance in the offspring as whether dominant or recessive traits. The genetic experiments performed by the Mendel with pea plants took him seven years and then he published his results in 1865. During this time, Mendel grew over ten thousand pea plants, keeping record of progeny number and its type.

Note: Mendel took the advantage of the property to produce true-breeding pea lines i.e. he self-fertilized and selected the peas for many generations until he got lines that consistently made offspring identical to the parent type.