In this video, we're going to talk about the generations of Mendel's plants. Gregor Mendel standardized the naming system of generations to track inheritance patterns. There are three generations that you all should be familiar with. The very first generation is the parental generation, commonly abbreviated as the P generation. This is the original set of individual plants that are mated, or the parents, if you will.
The second generation that you all should know is the first filial generation or, in other words, the F1 generation. The first filial generation is the offspring of the P generation. The word filial is related to children; thus, this generation is the children of the parental generation. Last but not least, we have the second filial generation or the F2 generation. This generation is the offspring of the F1 generation plants.
Let's take a look at our image down below to get a better idea of these generations. Notice here in our first block, we're showing you the P generation, which is the original set of parents that are mated. Here, what we have is a homozygous dominant pea plant being crossed with a homozygous recessive pea plant. When you set up their gametes on a Punnett square, like what you see here, and you fill in the Punnett square, what you're going to get are heterozygous individuals in each of these squares, representing a heterozygous genotype. The individuals inside of this Punnett square represent the F1 generation.
That leads us to the next part: the F1 generation, the first filial generation, the children of the parental generation. Because these offspring are all heterozygous, we can either self-fertilize a single heterozygous individual or cross-fertilize two heterozygous individuals. Either way, we're going to have heterozygous alleles of the gametes across the top. When we fill this in, what we will have is one homozygous dominant, two heterozygous, and one homozygous recessive; these are the possibilities of the offspring. So, these squares within here represent the F2 generation.
The F2 generation, as you can see here, includes three yellow and one green possibility among the four. The generations are referred to as the P generation, F1 generation, and F2 generation. This concludes our introduction to the generations of Mendel's plants, and we'll be able to get some practice applying this as we move forward in our course. So, I'll see you all in our next video.
