History of Model Organisms - Preliminary Works On Model Organisms

Preliminary Works On Model Organisms

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 describing the formation of a new species and he began his work with the pea plants that are so famously known today. In his experimentation to find a method by which Darwin’s ideas could be explained he hybridized and cross-bred the peas and found that in so doing he could isolate phenotypic characteristics of the peas. These discoveries made in the 1860s lay dormant for nearly forty years until they were rediscovered in 1900. Mendel’s work was then correlated with what was being called chromosomes within the nucleus of each cell. Mendel created a practical guide to breeding and this method has successfully been applied to select for some of the first model organisms of other genus and species such as Guinea pigs, Drosophila (fruit fly), mice, and viruses like the tobacco mosaic virus.

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