The plant that launched the genetic age has finally given up the secrets of its own DNA.

About 150 years after it helped Gregor Mendel to decipher the fundamental laws of inheritance, the pea plant’s genome has been analysed comprehensively for the first time.

The pea, which has the Latin name Pisum sativum, was fundamental to the celebrated 19th-century experiments from which Mendel, an Augustinian monk from what is now the Czech Republic, became recognised as the father of genetics.

By cultivating and cross-breeding more than 29,000 pea plants, Mendel showed that certain traits, such as round and wrinkled seeds, display very particular patterns of inheritance.

He established the concepts of dominant and recessive gene variants, and two basic laws that govern how these are transmitted from generation to generation.

Mendel’s work was rediscovered in the early 20th century and the principles he set down became central to the new science of genetics.

The pea thus played a direct part in the development of a field that was ultimately to reveal the double-helix structure of DNA. But despite the pea’s pivotal role and its continuing importance as a model organism for genetic research, the DNA of the plant has until now been difficult to study in detail.

French scientists have developed a technique that has produced the most detailed reference collection of pea plant mutations yet assembled.The results, from the French National Agricultural Research Institute (INRA), will provide a powerful tool with which to investigate the genetics of peas and other legumes.

This will also assist efforts to produce new varieties of pea, both by genetic engineering and by conventional breeding.

“By opening [this database] to the community, we hope to fulfil the expectations of both crop breeders and scientists who are using the pea as their model of study,” said Abdelhafid Bendahmane, who co-ordinated the research. Details of the study are published in the journal Genome Biology.

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