Mendel was a scientist who proposed the theory of inheritance based on his work done on pea plants.
According to his theory, the inheritance of a trait was determined by discrete and specific units of heredity which he called as factors.
Further, he explained that for any given trait each individual possesses one factor from each parent so that the individual has 2 factors for each trait and the variants of a given factor were termed as alleles.
The units of inheritance that were called as factors by Mendel are now termed as genes and it is the expression of these genes that encode for the observable trait in an organism and these are inherited from the parents.
