The Laws of Inheritance

Hi there, Fellas. Its almost midnight here.Today I have read Mendel's paper about Inheritance Laws and some article which have related with it. Do you know about Mendel's paper? Its okay if you didn't know anything about it. Its about mendel experiment and his theory about genetics. Actually, this article is not a summary of Mendel's paper or a conclusion about that. Its only my opinion about genetics in Mendel era and genetics nowadays. Since I'm also in the learning process so please correct me if I have a mistakes.

How could Mendel succeed in discovering laws of inheritance when people had no clue about underlying components and interactions? even field of biochemistry was still in its infancy and molecular biology was unheard of. There was hardly any technological aid to help Mendel ask the important fundamental questions in biology. In my opinion, the key reason for his success was his clear understanding that he needed to find ‘constants’.

It is interesting that the word “constant” appeared 69 times (CMIIW) in his paper (Mendel 1865) (I'll give the download link below this article). Mendel chose seven pairs of contrasting characteristics and ensured (through in-breeding) that each plant consistently exhibited the same feature. Even if he had included the eighth feature or considered only six pairs of contrasting characteristics, he would have still reached the same conclusion. That is because Mendel “artificially eliminated” noise from his samples and considered only those plants exhibiting consistent patterns both in isolation such as monohybrid crosses and in a group like di-hybrid crosses. It is important to understand that these seven pairs of contrasting features that is, phenotype-level constants, did not change with time, fluctuating environment and so on.

Due to this reason that is, the strength of the data quality, Mendel only used elementary mathematics such as addition and division, to obtain the Laws of Inheritance. In contrast, these days we are inundated with a morass of expression data, have a huge computational power, apply advance mathematical techniques, but are nothing close to identifying the network equivalent of Mendelian laws. Based on some books and articles, the reason is because its moving from the consistent phenotype level to the dynamic molecular level exposes us to a large body of variables such as, stochastic gene expression (Elowitz et al. 2002; Cai et al. 2006) and concentration gradients influencing cell–cell interactions (Gurdon and Bourillot 2001). The key, therefore, is to mine this vast space of variables for biological constants.

(Mendel's paper)

Cai L, Friedman N, Xie XS. Stochastic protein expression in individual cells at the single molecule level. Nature. 2006;440:358–362. doi: 10.1038/nature04599.

Elowitz MB, Levine AJ, Siggia ED, Swain PS. Stochastic gene expression in a single cell. Science. 2002;297:1183–1186. doi: 10.1126/science.1070919.

Gurdon JB, Bourillot P-Y. Morphogen gradient interpretation. Nature. 2001;413:797–803. doi: 10.1038/35101500.

Sorry for my poor English, feel so hard for me to write this article because there is a lot of words that I'd never heard before. By the way, Thank you for reading my article. see yaa~