Human uses of plants or dried flowers. Ornamental plants have sometimes changed the course of history, as in tulipomania. Basic biological research has often been done with plants. In genetics, the breeding of pea plants allowed Gregor Mendel to derive the basic laws governing inheritance, and examination of chromosomes in maize allowed Barbara McClintock to demonstrate their connection to inherited traits. The plant "Arabidopsis thaliana" is used in laboratories as a model organism to understand how genes control the growth and development of plant structures. NASA predicts that space stations or space colonies will one day rely on plants for life support. Scientific advances
Muriel Wheldale Onslow teachings. In 1900 she entered Newham College, Cambridge and took a class in Natural Sciences Tripos. In 1903 she joined William Bateson's genetics lab at Cambridge where she began her study focusing on the interaction of factors and of the inheritance of petal color in Antirrhinum (snapdragons). William Bateson was the English biologist who was the first person to use the term genetics to describe the study of heredity, and the chief populariser of the ideas of Gregor Mendel following their rediscovery in 1900. Bateson and Onslow carried out a series of breeding experiments in various plant and animal species