Definition of Mendelian

Mendelian: Referring to the great Moravian/Bohemian biologist Gregor Mendel (1822-84) who set forth the basic laws that constitute the foundation of classical genetics. Mendelian inheritance is the manner in which genes and traits are passed from parents to their children. The modes of Mendelian inheritance are autosomal dominant, autosomal recessive, X-linked dominant and X-linked recessive.

Gregor Mendel was a monk who lived in an Augustinian monastery where teaching and research were emphasized and where he was given the freedom to pursue scientific studies in the diverse fields that interested him: mathematics, botany, physics, and meteorology.

Mendel's meticulous controlled experiments with breeding peas in the monastery garden led him to conclude that the heritable units (now called genes) were not blends of parental traits but rather were separate physical entities passed individually from one generation to the next.

Mendel's report in 1865 of his discoveries long went unnoticed. Charles Darwin never read the copy of Mendel's paper he received The only scientist who did acknowledge it (a German botanist named Nageli) managed to misinterpret it. Mendel's discoveries were thus ignored for several decades. Then in 1900 (16 years after his death), Mendel's paper was rediscovered by three scientists working in different countries. With the rediscovery of Mendel's work, he came to be recognized as a great genius and the father of the new science of genetics.