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Patterns of gene action in plant development revealed by enhancer trap and gene trap transposable elements. Genes Dev. 9,

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The year 2006 is the 140th anniversary of Mendel's pathbreaking article. It is appropriate that a journal devoted to genetics begin the year with an article about Mendel and his work. Much has been written about his deep insights and the failure of the biological community to recognize his work. Here, on this anniversary, instead of extolling his success, we present a scholarly account of Mendel's frustrating attempts to repeat his findings in another species, which, unbeknownst to him, reproduced apomictically.J. F. Crow and W. F. Dove M ENDEL hoped that the highly polymorphic genus Hieracium would be particularly promising for verifying the laws of inheritance that he had discovered while working on Pisum. But all his incredibly painstaking emasculation and crossing experiments on Hieracium led to results that, to his consternation, seemingly stood in direct contradiction to his laws:1. The F 1 hybrids from crossings between, as he thought, ''true breeding'' strains were not uniform, as in Pisum; rather they varied in every conceivable way. 2. The putative F 2 generations, on the contrary, were uniform and did not segregate for any characters, as he would have expected.