Q.In his classic experiments on pea plants, Mendel did not use

Mendel chose garden pea (Pisum sativum) as his experimental organism for several practical reasons: it is an annual plant with clear, sharply contrasting characters each controlled by a single gene; it self-fertilises naturally under normal conditions, which let Mendel establish and verify pure-breeding lines by repeated self-crossing, while its large flowers also make artificial cross-pollination (emasculation followed by transferring pollen from another variety) straightforward when a controlled hybrid cross was wanted. He selected seven pairs of contrasting traits for study - stem height (tall/dwarf), pod shape (inflated/constricted), seed shape (round/wrinkled), seed colour (yellow/green), flower colour (purple/white), flower position (axial/terminal) and pod colour (green/yellow) - each associated with a specific classical gene symbol (L …