a. Which 19th century Austrian monk is noted for his experimental work on heredity? b. What kind of plant did he use in his basic work on heredity?

Often called the "father of modern genetics," this 19th-century Augustinian friar laid the groundwork for our understanding of how traits are passed from one generation to the next. Through meticulous experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 in his monastery garden, he challenged the prevailing notion of "blending inheritance," which suggested offspring were simply a mix of their parents' characteristics. Instead, he demonstrated that traits are passed on as discrete units, which we now know as genes. His work established the fundamental laws of inheritance, coining the terms "dominant" and "recessive" to explain why some traits appear over others.

The subject of his groundbreaking research was the common garden pea plant, *Pisum sativum*. He chose these plants for several practical reasons. They were easy to cultivate, grew quickly, and produced a large number of offspring in a short time. Crucially, pea plants possessed a variety of distinct, easily observable traits, such as seed shape (round or wrinkled) and flower color (violet or white). The structure of the pea flower also allowed him to control fertilization, either by letting the plants self-pollinate or by manually cross-pollinating them with a brush to ensure he knew the exact parentage of each new plant.

Over nearly a decade, he cultivated and tested some 28,000 pea plants to systematically track how these seven different characteristics were inherited. By analyzing his vast amounts of data, he was able to identify predictable patterns in the passing of traits. Despite the profound importance of his findings, his work was largely overlooked by the wider scientific community during his lifetime, only gaining the recognition it deserved in the early 1900s.