Mendel's law of segregation states that:

Comprehension:

Principles of Inheritance

Read the following passage carefully and answer the given questions.

Gregor Mendel conducted hybridisation experiments on garden peas for seven contrasting characters. He crossed tall and dwarf pea plants to study the inheritance of characters. Mendel observed that all the F₁ progeny plants were tall. Mendel then self-pollinated tall F₁ plants and surprisingly observed the proportion of tall and dwarf plants in 3:1 ratio. Hence, the tall and dwarf traits were identical to their parental type and did not show any blending that is all the offspring were either tall or dwarf and none were of in between height. This study explains the Law of Segregation that the alleles do not show any blending and that both the characters are recovered as such in the F₂ generation though one of these is not seen at the F₁ generation. Further, Mendel observed the four different phenotypes from the cross of two contrasting characters (seed shape and seed color) which led to the conclusion that when two pairs of traits are combined in a hybrid, segregation of one pair of characters is independent of the other pair of characters as stated by Law of Independent Assortment. 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 law. The important things to remember that chromosomes as well as genes occur in pairs. The two alleles of a gene pairs are located on homologous sites on homologous chromosomes.