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Mendel's paper 'Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden' is the best known in a series of studies published in the late 18th and 19th centuries that built our understanding of the mechanism of inheritance. Mendel investigated the segregation of seven gene characters of pea (Pisum sativum), of which four have been identified. Here, we review what is known about the molecular nature of these genes, which encode enzymes (R and Le), a biochemical regulator (I) and a transcription factor (A). The mutations are: a transposon insertion (r), an amino acid insertion (i), a splice variant (a) and a missense mutation (le-1). The nature of the three remaining uncharacterized characters (green versus yellow pods, inflated versus constricted pods, and axial versus terminal flowers) is discussed.

Immature cotyledons from six cultivars and breeding lines of Pisum sativum were cocultivated with Agrobacterium tumefaciens and selected on a medium containing kanamycin. Transformed plants were recovered with a success rate of between 0.8 and 3.4% of explants treated. The plasmids used were based on pGA643 and have a nos promoter driving an nptII gene. Progeny from the primary transformants showed stable inheritance of the nos-nptII gene.