Special Issue: Mendel’s laws of heredity on his 200th birthday: What have we learned by considering exceptions?
This Special Issue celebrates Mendel’s 200th birthday by focusing on exceptions to the Mendelian ‘laws’. Discovery in science is often driven forward more by exceptions than by rules. In genetics, Mendel’s laws of heredity provide the basic ‘rules’. Recent decades have seen an explosion in discoveries that violate these rules, which has driven the field of genetics forward. Indeed, these ‘exceptions’ can shape patterns of inheritance and can have important impacts on evolutionary processes.
The field of genetics is definitely richer for the recognition of the diversity of phenomena that lead to violations of Mendel’s laws. While it still makes sense to introduce students to the logics of transmission genetics by outlining the conceptual basis to Mendel’s laws, an understanding of heredity goes well beyond these elementary principles. An appreciation for the exceptions to Mendelian ‘laws’ do not so much complicate matters as they clarify the real nature of how traits are inherited, and thus support the conceptual underpinnings that drove Mendel’s thoughts. As we celebrate Mendel’s 200th birthday, it is clear that the field that his insights helped found will continue to advance as further exceptions to his laws are identified and dissected.
Genetics Society Executives:
Jason B. Wolf, Department of Biology & Biochemistry and The Milner Centre for Evolution, University of Bath, Bath, UK
Anne C Ferguson-Smith,, Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, UK
Alexander Lorenz, Institute of Medical Sciences (IMS), University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK
