 In this module we look at Mendel's experiment, we will see what was Mendel's question, how he designed his experiment and how he was able to conclude the conclusions of his experiments. So before we get to that, let me introduce to you the Mendel's subject. Mendel was working on pea plants, these are the garden pea plants. These plants are easy to cultivate, they have short lifespan and they have several characteristics and several traits that Mendel could follow. Flowers are the reproductive organs of these plants. As you know that most flowers have both male and female reproductive organs. The ovary is the female sex organ, you can see it on your screen. The stigma is the part of the flower where the pollen lands and extends the tube, pollen is sperm equivalent of the plants. Anthers are the male sex organs, these are attached to stamens which are filamentous structures and anthers produce pollens which can then land on stigma and fertilize the egg inside the ovary. So Mendel used these plants, it was easy to grow them as I mentioned. These plants can also be controlled in such a way that if Mendel wanted he could remove the male or the female sex organs or he could self pollinate the plant itself. The technique Mendel used was simple, he used a paintbrush, he rubbed it on the anthers and he collected pollens in the tip of the brush and later he dusted on the stigma of the female part of the flower. As a result the pollens fertilize the egg and resulted in seeds which he could grow and look at the next generation of the cross, of the breeding experiment between two types of flowers. The first experiment he did involved the shape of the seed, Mendel noticed that there were two types of seeds, a sephirical shape and a wrinkled shape, he crossed before he began his experiment he wanted to make sure, ensure that the plants were true breeding, what do I mean by that? He self crossed, he or crossed a typical plant for the typical trait, a specific trait with a plant of the same trait, with the same specific trait. So for example he crossed plants with spherical seeds with other plants with sephirical seeds for several generations to ensure that now the plant has true breeding, the trait it carries is now completely sephirical. He did the same exercise with the plants that had wrinkled seed to ensure that these are also true breeding plants which produced wrinkled seeds. Then he cross pollinated a plant that was making, was going to produce sephirical seed with a plant that was going to produce wrinkled seed. So these plants were the parental plants which were true breeding and donated parental plants or P abbreviated P, he Mendel got the first generation he got the result of his experiment produced all sephirical seeds. Now if the blending concept was correct, all these seeds would be semi wrinkled and semi sephirical. It was as the wrinkled seed trait had completely disappeared because none of these plants of F1 generation which stands for first filial generation they had any wrinkled seeds. So here we could see the blending theory was incorrect because blending theory would have predicted that the offspring would have mixture of characteristics from both the parents. Then he crossed the F1 generation among themselves and he got the F2 or second filial generation. He saw that in the F2 generation the seeds three out of four seeds were sephirical and one out of four seeds were wrinkled. So what were the conclusions, how he used this data to interpret the results and how he was able to conclude about make specific conclusions about the particulate theory, we will look at that in the following segment.