SCIENTISTS
1. Principles of inheritance and variation
i. Gregor Mendel, conducted hybridisation experiments on garden
peas for seven years (1856-1863) and proposed the laws of
inheritance in living organisms.
ii. The production of gametes by the parents, the formation of the
zygotes, the F1 and F2 plants can be understood from a diagram
called Punnett Square. It was developed by a British geneticist,
Reginald C. Punnett.
iii. In 1900, three Scientists (de Vries, Correns and von Tschermak)
independently rediscovered Mendel’s results on the inheritance
of characters. Also, by this time due to advancements in
microscopy that were taking place, scientists were able to
carefully observe cell division. This led to the discovery of
structures in the nucleus that appeared to double and divide just
before each cell division. These were called chromosomes
(colored bodies, as they were visualised by staining).
iv. By 1902, the chromosome movement during meiosis had been
worked out. Walter Sutton and Theodore Boveri noted that the
behaviour of chromosomes was parallel to the behaviour of
genes and used chromosome movement to explain Mendel’s
laws. The behaviour of chromosomes during mitosis (equational
division) and during meiosis (reduction division). The important
things to remember are that chromosomes as well as genes
occur in pairs. The two alleles of a gene pair are located on
homologous sites on homologous chromosomes. Sutton and
Boveri argued that the pairing and separation of a pair of
chromosomes would lead to the segregation of a pair of factors
they carried. Sutton united the knowledge of chromosomal
segregation with Mendelian principles and called it the
chromosomal theory of inheritance.
v. Experimental verification of the chromosomal theory of
inheritance by Thomas Hunt Morgan and his colleagues, led to
discovering the basis for the variation that sexual reproduction
produced.
vi. Alfred Sturtevant was a student Thomas Hunt Morgan. Alfred
Sturtevant used the frequency of recombination between gene
pairs on the same chromosome as a measure of the distance
between genes and ‘mapped’ their position on the chromosome.
vii. Henking (1891) could trace a specific nuclear structure all
through spermatogenesis in a few insects, and it was also
observed by him that 50 per cent of the sperm received this
structure after spermatogenesis, whereas the other 50 per cent
sperm did not receive it. Henking gave a name to this structure
as the X body but he could not explain its significance. Further
investigations by other scientists led to the conclusion that the ‘X
body’ of Henking was in fact a chromosome.
viii. Down’s Syndrome was first described by Langdon Down (1866)