What are the financial implications in understanding Mendelian genetics for breeding?

Answer 1

Mendel did the scientific world a huge service by figuring out that traits are inherited from mothers and fathers. This allows a scientist to predict the probability that babies of parents will express certain traits.

This has HUGE implications for farming, flower growing, food production, animal husbandry, etc.

Traits -- (color, size, fertility... you name it) -- are determined by the stuff that an organism is made of. For instance, the color of skin of people is determined by the amount of the protein Melanin which is present in the cells of the skin. The code for that stuff is contained within an organism's DNA, think of it like a codebook. DNA is separated into sections -- called GENES -- just like books are separated into chapters. Everyone has their own, unique DNA book. And for simple traits, many organisms (including humans and dogs) have two copies of the DNA book, one they inherited from their mother and one they inherited from their father. That means that for each GENE, they also have 2 copies.

Mendel figured out that if you did enough experiments by breeding things (he bred plants!) you can figure out patterns in which traits are expressed. Like the color of flowers. If he mated a purple and a white flower, he saw, the offspring would produce purple flowers. Once he had done this enough times, he felt pretty certain that something was going on with the DNA books of the offspring that made them purple, even if they had come from one purple and one white parent. He designed a series of rules to describe his findings. And farmers, planters, and dog breeders all also use rules like this to predict how the offspring of a mating will go.

What was going on -- he figured out -- is that if a baby plant had two DNA books (one from its mom plant and one from its dad plant), and each DNA book contained chapters which dealt specifically with flower color (genes), one of the chapters (either from the mom or the dad) would WIN OUT when it came to what color flowers the baby would make. So if dad plant was white and mom plant was purple, baby plant would be ... purple. Purple seemed to win. He called this a DOMINANT gene. White seemed to lose. He called this a recessive gene. He decided dominant genes would be written with BIG letters and recessive genes would be written with small letters.

I want to point out here that NOT ALL TRAITS work like this! Think about height for instance. Mom might be short and Dad might be tall. A kid is not TALL OR short when she grows up! A kid can fall anywhere along a SPECTRUM of heights. Mendel figured out a lot... but there was so much more he didn't know. Terms like epigenetics.... regulatory elements ... transcription factors. .. maternal effect proteins. Things get crazy when it comes to genetics! And yet for some characteristics, he was absolutely correct.

Answer 2

Hi Joel!

Mendelian genetics can be used in a broad array of organisms, but for this example I'm going to focus mainly on plants.

There are certain traits that follow a strictly mendelian mode of passing genes from parents to offspring. If you are a company that wants to capitalize on a specific trait (ex. round peas vs. wrinkly peas), it is very helpful to understand how mendelian genetics works so that you can cross two specific parental plant in order to yield the maximum number of desired offspring.

For example, if wrinkly peas are a homozygous recessive trait, then crossing two plants with a wrinkly pea phenotype will produce only wrinkly pea offspring. This saves the company a lot of money, because then they are not using resources on breeding plants with a undesirable phenotype. This also helps the company bring in more money because they now have more product to sell.

I hope this is helpful!