Gregor Mendel of Mendelian inheritance. Mendel worked with seven characteristics of pea plants: plant height, pod shape and color, seed shape and color, and flower position and color. Taking seed color as an example, Mendel showed that when a true-breeding yellow pea and a true-breeding green pea were cross-bred their offspring always produced yellow seeds. However, in the next generation, the green peas reappeared at a ratio of 1 green to 3 yellow. To explain this phenomenon, Mendel coined the terms “recessive” and “dominant” in reference to certain traits. (In the preceding example, the green trait, which seems to have vanished in
History of model organisms respective work on natural selection and the genetics of heredity. These early works in finding standards to compare organisms against continued into the 20th century as the first model organisms were brought into laboratories. Beginning in the early 1900s "Drosophila" entered the research laboratories and opened up the doors for other model organisms like Tobacco mosaic virus, E. coli, C57BL/6 (lab mice), etc. These organisms have led to many advances in the past century. Some of the first work with what would be considered model organisms started because Gregor Johann Mendel felt that the views of Darwin were insufficient in