Gregor Mendel's Genetic Inheritance Theories Gregor Mendel played a huge role in the principles behind genetic inheritance. He grew up in an Augustinian brotherhood where he learned agricultural training with basic education. He then moved on to the Olmutz Philosophical Institute and then entered the Augustinian Monastery in 1843. After 3 years of theological studies, Mendel went to the University of Vienna where he was influenced by 2 professors, the physicist Doppler and a botanist named Unger. Here he learned to study science through experimentation and sparked his interest in the causes of plant variation. Then, in 1857, Mendel began growing peas in the abbey garden to study heredity which led to his law of segregation and independent assortment. Mendel's law of segregation stated that members of a pair of homologous chromosomes segregate during meiosis and are distributed to different gametes. . This hypothesis can be divided into four main ideas. The first idea is that alternative versions of genes are responsible for variations in inherited traits. Different alleles will create different variations in inherited traits. The second idea is that for each trait, an organism inherits two genes, one from each parent. So this means that a homologous loci can have corresponding alleles, as in full-blooded plants of Mendel's P (parental) generation. If the alleles differ, you will have F hybrids. The third idea states that if the two alleles differ, the recessive allele will have no effect on the appearance of the organism. So, an F hybrid plant that has purple flowers, the dominant allele will be the purple color allele and the recessive allele will be the white color allele.