Google Doodle pays tribute to friar-scientist Mendel

Search giant Google paid tribute to Augustinian friar and scientist Gregor Johann Mendel Wednesday, as it marked his 189th birth anniversary with one of its Doodles. Visitors to Google's homepage (www.google.com) were greeted with a doodle of peas, referring to Mendel's experiments on plant hybridization.

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia said his study of inheritance of traits in pea plants earned him posthumous fame as the figurehead of the science of genetics. Mendel had been noted to have cultivated some 29,000 pea plants between 1856 and 1863, with his experiments leading him to make Mendel's Laws of Inheritance - the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment. The Law of Segregation states that when any individual produces gametes, the copies of a gene separate so that each gamete receives only one copy. Or, two coexisting alleles of an individual for each trait segregate (separate) during gamete formation so that each gamete gets only one of the two alleles. Alleles again unite at random fertilization of gametes. The Law of Independent Assortment or "Inheritance Law" states that alleles of different genes assort independently of one another during gamete formation. However, the significance of his work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century. — LBG, GMA News