Thread by @PeterJvanDijk1

1. Today our paper “How did Mendel arrive at his discoveries?” came out in @NatureGenetics. Why did nobody in the 19th century do what #Mendel did? We, Peter van Dijk @KeyGeneInfo, Noel Ellis @JohnInnesCentre and Adrienne Jessop, wrote a Perspective. nature.com/articles/s4158…

2. Two recently found 1861-newspaper articles stated that Mendel had an applied vegetable breeding and a scientific research program: “Fr. Gregor Mendl is concerned with…..experiments, which are aimed at improving the vegetable and flower varieties cultivated in our region.”

3. Mendel crossed peas, beans & cucumbers. Seed traits in Mendel’s 34 pea varieties were variable and easily observable. It is plausible that Mendel with his “prepared mind” noticed the recurrent segregation patterns and that the scientific research emerged from applied breeding.

4. The behavior of the seed traits likely piqued Mendel’s curiosity about the transmission of plant traits (flower color, height, pod color etc), resulting in the large, dedicated crossing program described in the 1866-paper. From this Mendel deduced the rules of inheritance.

5. The algebraic series have eclipsed the cell biology in Mendel’s paper. However, Mendel’s notion that only one pollen grain united randomly with one egg cell was totally new. We suggest that Mendel was strongly influenced by his untimely deceased friend Johann Nave.

6. Mendel sent a reprint to the famous botany prof Carl Nägeli. Nägeli understood that Mendel’s pea paper was about inheritance, but as a firm believer in blending inheritance was not convinced. After that Mendel switched to experimental crosses in hawkweeds.

7. It is a myth that Mendel became frustrated when he could not repeat his pea findings with hawkweeds. Instead, he was looking for “constant hybrids” that did not segregate in contrast to the “variable hybrids” like peas, see doi.org/10.1534/geneti…

P.S. a read-only version is available at rdcu.be/cRprG