Plant genetics He worked at the Abbey of St. Thomas in Bruno , where his organism of choice for studying inheritance and traits was the pea plant. Mendel's work tracked many phenotypic traits of pea plants, such as their height, flower color, and seed characteristics. Mendel showed that the inheritance of these traits follows two particular laws, which were later named after him. His seminal work on genetics, “Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden” (Experiments on Plant Hybrids), was published in 1866, but went almost entirely unnoticed until 1900 when prominent botanists in the UK, like Sir Gavin de Beer, recognized its importance and re-published
Genetics and the Origin of Species that give them a competitive advantage, and they have the best chance of surviving and procreating. The main element lacking in the theory was any mechanism that would allow organisms to pass on these favorable variations. Lacking such a mechanism, the theory of evolution faced competition from theories such as neo-Lamarckism, in which the environment acted directly on organisms, changing their structures. Darwin did not know that the monk Gregor Mendel was already working on experiments that would explain inheritance in terms of units of heredity that we now call genes. When Mendelian genetics was rediscovered by several scientists, it