what is law of segregation

The law of segregation is one of the fundamental principles of genetics, proposed by Gregor Mendel in the mid-1800s. It states that each individual that is a diploid has a pair of alleles (copy) for a particular trait, and each parent passes an allele at random to their offspring resulting in a diploid organism. The allele that contains the dominant trait determines the phenotype of the offspring/12%3A_Mendels_Experiments_and_Heredity/12.03%3A_Laws_of_Inheritance/12.3C%3A_Mendels_Law_of_Segregation). When an organism makes gametes, each gamete receives just one gene copy, which is selected randomly. This is known as the law of segregation. The law of segregation applies only to traits that completely control a single gene pair in which one of the two alleles is overriding the other. Therefore, the law of segregation does not apply to incompletely dominant or codominant traits. The physical basis of Mendel’s law of segregation is the first division of meiosis in which the homologous chromosomes with their different versions of each gene are segregated into daughter nuclei/12%3A_Mendels_Experiments_and_Heredity/12.03%3A_Laws_of_Inheritance/12.3C%3A_Mendels_Law_of_Segregation). The equal segregation of alleles is the reason we can apply the Punnett square to accurately predict the offspring of parents with known genotypes/12%3A_Mendels_Experiments_and_Heredity/12.03%3A_Laws_of_Inheritance/12.3C%3A_Mendels_Law_of_Segregation).