Genomics tackles the final mysteries of Mendel's peas

Two scientific giants revolutionized biology in the ^19th century. Charles Darwin, in 1859, with his work On the Origin of Species , which he had long matured after his circumnavigation of the world aboard the Beagle . And the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, in 1866, in an account of experiments in hybridizing peas presented the previous year to the Natural History Society of Brünn (now Brno, Czech Republic). The fruit of a circumnavigation, against those of a simple monastic garden.

But, while the importance of the British man's theory was immediately perceived by his contemporaries, it was not until the beginning of the ^20th century, fifteen years after his death, that the laws of heredity that Mendel had drawn from his observations were rediscovered. The characteristics of his peas have since passed into posterity, and continue to occupy biologists and geneticists, as evidenced by a study published on April 23 in the journal Nature .

The study was based on the pea seed collection at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, whose first director, William Bateson, had introduced the British to Mendel's work in 1901. Five years later, he proposed using the term "genetics" to name the nascent discipline. This historical continuity was not lost on Noam Chayut, head of this seed collection, who co-directed the study published in Nature : "This work salutes that of Mendel, who remains truly inspiring: his only tools were his eyes and his love of mathematics." Suspicions about his integrity, due to results that seemed too good to be true, are, in his opinion, groundless.

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