Mendel did experiments in which he kept track of the inheritance of seed texture (wrinkled or smooth). First he created true-bre
eding lines: Parents with smooth seeds produced offspring with smooth seeds, and parents with wrinkled seeds produced offspring with wrinkled seeds. Then when he crossed wrinkled and smooth peas from these true-breeding lines, all of the offspring were smooth. Which trait was dominant
In complete dominance, a gene may have two different variants or 'alleles', dominant and recessive. A dominant allele is a gene variant that is able to produce a certain phenotype, even in the presence of other alleles, while a recessive allele is a gene variant that is masked by the dominant allele in heterozygous individuals (i.e., individuals that inherited different alleles from each parent). By crossing smooth and wrinkled pea plants, Mendel observed the offspring (F1) were smooth rather than mixed, indicating one type of seed texture was dominant over the other. Subsequently, Mendel observed that alleles for different traits (e.g., seed texture and seed color) assorted independently during meiosis.
