Background: Gregor Mendel and the P Generation

Gregor Mendel was a monk who crossbred pea plants in order to better study inheritance patterns
in living organisms. He was not recognized for his work until after his death, but he's looked upon as
the father of modern genetics.
Mendel is responsible for much of what we understand about how traits are inherited and
furthermore how inheritance and genetics work. When you look at his experiments, you'll notice a
number of different terms, the first of which is P generation.
The P generation is the start of Mendel's work on inheritance, or receiving genetic qualities by
transmission from parent to offspring. Basically it refers to traits or genes that are passed from a
parental generation to its offspring. Wait, did I just say parent? Yes I did, because the P generation
is just that.....the parental generation.

What Exactly Does the P Generation Do?

In Mendel's experiments, he would cross two true breeding plants, that is plants that have self
pollinated and will now only express one particular trait, such as color. He would choose two true
breeding plants that would express different versions of one trait and cross pollinate them. These
plants then became the P generation, and their offspring were referred to as the F1 generation. He
would then breed the F1 generation in order to create an F2 generation, and so on.
What Mendel was able to find was that certain traits were dominant to others. By starting with two
true breeding plants, he was able to show that a genotype, or genetic combination, would change in
the F1 generation but still show the same phenotype, or observed trait.
For example if one plant had blue flowers and the other had pink, the genotype of the blue might be
BB and the genotype of the pink might be bb. When they cross, you end up with all Bb but they
express the B only (blue flowers). This is a simplistic example; it's really more complicated than that.

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part 1

n this lesson, we will be discussing what the F1 generation is with regards to Mendelian genetics.
We'll look at who discovered this F1 generation and how it is used to help us better understand
inheritance as far as genes and traits are concerned.

What is the F1 Generation?

Gregor Mendel was a pioneer in the world of genetics. Known as the 'Father of Modern Genetics',
he is responsible for much of what we understand about how genetics work and how traits are
passed on. His experiments of cross-breeding pea plants allowed us a glimpse into how our very
own traits can be passed on or left behind. In Mendel's experiments, he would typically cross-
pollinate different pea plants in hopes of getting specific and certain traits to show. When looking at
his experiments, we notice the term 'F1 generation' comes up often. But what does it mean?
 Gregor Mendel

In basic terminology, the F1 generation is the first generation of offspring produced by a set of
parents. The 'F' in F1 stands for 'filial.' So in short, F1 means 'first filial generation'.

F1 Generation Example

If you are crossing two parents that are 'true breeding' - meaning they each have homozygous traits
(one has dominant traits, the other has recessive traits) - the F1 generation will typically be
heterozygous (having a genotype that is heterozygous and a phenotype that is dominant). Basically,
if you have a parent with completely dominant genes and traits and cross them with another parent
that displays recessive traits and has recessive genes, the F1 generation will display the dominant
trait only. This occurs for purebred species only, and most organisms have multiple genes that will
cross in other manners, resulting in slightly different F1 generations.
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part 2
In this lesson, we'll explore what an F2 generation is, how one arrives at this particular generation, and
what the expected characteristics and distributions are among individuals.

Mendelian Genetics
What happens to the offspring if you breed two different colored flowers? And what happens to
the offspring of those offspring?
You're probably familiar with monk and geneticist Gregor Mendel. It was through his work
with pea plants that we first learned about genetics, the branch of biology that explores how
genes dictate the characteristics of plants and animals.
Mendel didn't have any fancy equipment to help him determine a flower's genotype, or genetic
makeup. All he had was the knowledge that, when he bred certain plants, the offspring had
flowers of one color or they did not. From this he could work out if a flower was homozygous
dominant, meaning it had two dominant alleles for one color; heterozygous, with one dominant
allele and one recessive allele; or homozygous recessive, with two recessive alleles.
Mendellian genetics begins with cross-breeding two parents of homozygous genotypes. This is
known as true breeding. True breeding refers to a purebred status, meaning you know what
alleles it will pass on. In other words, while a heterozygous individual might pass on a dominant
or recessive allele, a homozygous individual with the genotype BB can only pass on a B allele.
This is the first filial, or F1 generation. The F2 generation is the second filial generation of any
cross-breed. What can we expect of the F2 generation in terms of characteristics, genetics, and
distribution? Let's find out.

Filial Groups: F1
Let's say we are working with purple and white pea plants. We use a parental group or pair of
true breeding individuals, so we know that one is purple and, therefore, homozygous dominant
(BB), while the other is white and, therefore, homozygous recessive (bb). This variation ensures
some level of genetic diversity in the F1 generation; otherwise we'd just end up with genetic
clones, and what fun would that be?
Now we can create a Punnett square. One set of parental alleles is distributed across the top of
the square, while the second runs along the side. By arranging them like this, we can distribute
one allele per parent to each of the hypothesized four offspring. Now we know the genotypic
distribution and can discern the phenotype, too. In other words, since all the offspring are
heterozygous, they will all be purple.
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part 3
Some genetic characteristics are inherited in predictable patterns. In this lesson you will learn what
monohybrids are and how to predict the kinds of characteristics that their offspring will show.

It's All In the Genes

Genetics - we all know it takes two parents to get things started, but after that things seem to get
pretty complicated. Ever wonder why that cute puppy is the only one of the litter that looks like the
mother? Or why no one in that big family down the street has their father's red hair? Many of the
mechanisms of inheritance can be complex, but there are some characteristics that can be followed
from one generation to the next in a fairly straightforward way. In 1865, long before our modern
understanding of genetics and DNA, a scientist named Gregor Mendel discovered some of the
secrets of inheritance and became the first to describe the monohybrid cross.

Gregor Mendel

The Monohybrid Cross

Let's take a look at the parts of the term. A cross refers to the process of fertilization and production
of a new generation, and the prefix mono means 'singular'. Mendel started off by focusing his
studies on singular inherited characteristics, or traits, from crosses of his pea plants.
Mendel raised hundreds of pea plants for his experiments, and he learned a lot about how they
passed on traits from one generation to another. He noticed that for some traits, like flower color or
seed shape, different plants would show only two forms of the trait. For example, plants had either
white or purple colored flowers, or rounded or wrinkly seeds. He could also produce a pure line of
plants that would only produce offspring with one form of a single trait, so that purple flowered plants
always had purple flowered offspring.
A hybrid, then, is a plant that is the result of a cross between two plants that are both pure for
different forms of the same trait. Gardeners do this all the time, and most of us are familiar with the
term 'hybrid' from the beautiful colors that are produced in hybrid roses.
Mendel's hybrids didn't act the way roses do, though. There was no blending of colors or seed type -
in fact, the offspring of these pure crosses always, 100% of the time, looked like only one of the
parent plants, never the other. So Mendel decided to find out what would happen in the next
generation if he crossed the monohybrids with each other - creating the monohybrid cross.

Dominant and Recessive

Mendel noticed that one of the forms of the trait occurred more often in nature - this was the form
that always appeared in his first generation of hybrids. He called it the dominant form of the trait; the
other was called recessive because it seemed to disappear from some generations. Although the
first cross of the two pure strains always resulted in all of the offspring showing the dominant form of
the trait, the second generation, the monohybrid cross, always resulted in a three to one ratio of
dominant to recessive offspring.
Mendel's ratios were consistent because he used such large numbers of plants (recall that if you flip
a coin a few times it may not result in a 50/50 ratio of heads to tails, but the more tosses you do, the
closer you will come to that number).

Now this all happened before our modern knowledge of how DNA works to pass along information to
every cell in every living organism. Because all living things had two parents, it made sense to
Mendel that at least two copies of the information were present for each particular trait. This turned
out to be true, and we now call the DNA information for a single trait a gene, and the two copies of
the genes which are inherited from each parent are called alleles. For traits that are inherited
according to this model (remember, not all traits are inherited this way), organisms can have three
possible sets of genetic information: either two of the same alleles for one of the forms of the trait, or
one each of the two different possible alleles.
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part 4
In this lesson, learn what a dihybrid cross is and see an example. Also, find out about phenotypic
ratio and how it's the same for each dihybrid cross. After the lesson, test your knowledge with a quiz.

Reviewing Definitions
What happens if you breed plants with different traits? For example, if you bred two pea plants with
purple flowers and long stems, would you be surprised to get an offspring with white flowers and a
short stem? It can certainly happen.
Let's take a look at how we can predict the possible offspring of two individuals. But first, let's go
over some terms.
Genes are the units of heredity of all organisms. Different versions of the same gene are
called alleles. A gene usually has two alleles: one from the mother and one from the father. Each
allele is assigned a letter, either uppercase or lowercase, indicating whether it's recessive or
dominant for a particular trait.
For example, an allele for patterning might be represented by a 'C' if it's dominant or a 'c' if it's
recessive. Let's say the 'C' stands for a striped pattern while the 'c' is for a spotted pattern. If an
organism inherits two 'C's (CC), it will have a striped pattern.
But what happens if the organism gets one dominant allele and one recessive allele? The dominant
allele will mask the effect of the recessive allele, and the organism will still have a striped pattern.
However, if the organism inherits two recessive alleles, or two 'c's (cc), it will have a spotted pattern.
If an individual has the same two alleles for a gene (CC or cc, in this case), this is
called homozygous. If an individual has two different alleles for a gene, (Cc), this is
called heterozygous. You can remember this by knowing that homo- means the same, and hetero-
means different.
The combination of alleles an individual inherits is its genotype, while the physical manifestation of a
gene, or what an individual looks like, is its phenotype. To determine all the possible genotypes and
phenotypes of an organism's offspring, scientists perform crosses.

A Dihybrid Cross
A dihybrid cross is a cross between two individuals that are both heterozygous for two different
traits. As an example, let's look at pea plants and say the two different traits we're examining are
color and height. In other words, each plant has:

 One dominant allele F for purple color and one recessive allele f for white color and
 One dominant allele H for height and one recessive allele h, which produces a dwarf pea
plant
Remember that dominant alleles hide the effects of recessive alleles, which means the phenotype
associated with our heterozygous plants is tall with purple flowers.
In a cross, each parent plant contributes one allele for each gene, and every parental allele has an
equal chance of being given to the offspring. So, a plant with the genotype FfHh can give its
offspring one of four possible allele combinations:

Punnett squares illustrate what happens when two pairs of alleles are
crossed

In the case of two true breeding parents, we will always end up with heterozygous offspring,
meaning they'll each have one dominant and one recessive allele. No matter how many times we
crossed these individuals, we would never get any white flowers. One thing to keep in mind as
we apply Mendelian genetics is that it doesn't allow for gene mutations. So what do we get if we
cross the offspring?
https://study.com/academy/lesson/dihybrid-cross-definition-example-quiz.ht part 5