Engage the public in a walk through, life-size time-line of major events in the history of genetics from Mendel’s pea plant experiment to cutting edge CRISPR experiments. The timeline will seamlessly exist within a garden shaped like Mendel’s famous hypothesis about recessive and dominant traits.

One will have the opportunity to wander through small sweet pea gardens. The trellis will be either tall or short reflecting the dominant and recessive notation Mendel used in his experiments. Each garden will have a figurine that will show the participant which experiment they should click on. Each image is linked to a video explaining the scientific phenomenon.

If you put the experiments in the right order, you are gifted a sweet pea seed of your own!

Idea 1: Run the Mendel experiment with genetic control of the pea plants.

Plant the short pea plants and tall pea plants on their respective fences.

Use the exhibit as a way to explain each step of the process with videos and pictures.

Idea 2: In each garden bed, add a genetic experiment relating to the real-life application of genetics questions.

Examples include:

Look at cells and chromosomes underneath the microscope

Run a PCR: What is a PCR?

Run a Gel: What is size exclusion? How is it used for protein work?

Cards and Images:

https://a-z-animals.com/animals/wolf/

https://www.equilter.com/product/267531/food-festival-heirloom-corn-raisin-digital-print

https://www.mayaarchaeologist.co.uk/school-resources/maya-world/maya-maize-and-farming/

https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~frist/PLNT3140/l11/l11.html

https://sites.tufts.edu/crispr/crispr-mechanism/

https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/2347-what-is-pcr

https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=157090&picture=gray-wolf-portrait

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2015/461524/

Other:

https://opentextbc.ca/conceptsofbiologyopenstax/chapter/mendels-experiments/

https://www.genome.gov/Pages/Education/GeneticTimeline.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4385642/pdf/BMRI2015-461524.pdf

https://www.genome.gov/human-genome-project/Timeline-of-Events