The tetrad-pollen model fails to explain the bias in Mendel's pea (Pisum sativum) experiments
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Updated: Jul 9, 2026

A High-Resolution, Single-Grain, In Vivo Pollen Hydration Bioassay for Arabidopsis thaliana
Published on: June 30, 2023
Daniel J Fairbanks1, G Bruce Schaalje
1Department of Plant and Wildlife Sciences, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602, USA.
Abstract:
For >40 years, geneticists and science historians have appealed to the tetrad-pollen model as an explanation of the bias toward expectation in Mendel's data, albeit without experimental support. Our experiments demonstrate that pollen sampling during self-pollination in pea conforms to the binomial distribution with no evidence of a tetrad-pollen effect.
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