Definition
noun
(genetics) A type of biological inheritance wherein the patterns of phenotypes do not accord with those as expected in Mendelian laws on inheritance
Supplement
Gregor Mendel is an Augustinian monk and botanist who formulated the laws of heredity based on his experiments on garden pea plant breeding. Later, he was recognized for his seminal works on genetics. For this, he is recognized as the Father of Genetics. Breeding and testing about 5,000 pea plants, he was able to come up with essential generalizations that were used as founding principles of Mendelian inheritance or Mendel’s Principles of Heredity. He presented the so-called “Mendel’s laws of inheritance”, particularly the Law of Segregation, the Law of Independent Assortment, and the Law of Dominance. However, there is another type of biological inheritance wherein the patterns of phenotypes do not accord with those as expected in Mendelian laws on inheritance. This is called Non-Mendelian inheritance.
Non-Mendelian inheritance includes extranuclear inheritance, gene conversion, infectious heredity, genomic imprinting, mosaicism, and trinucleotide repeat disorders.
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