Why were purebred peas important for Mendel's experiments?

The experiment that Mendel performed on pea plants could be performed on other plants also. But by profession Mendel was not a scientist; he worked on this subject merely because he was much interested and curious about it.

There were many reasons for him to select pea plants for his experiments. Some of the reasons are:

1. Pea (Pisum sativum) was readily available for him.
2. Peas have many varieties and could be used to check the phenomenon of genetic variations in a number of factors.
3. Peas are bisexual in nature. This made cross-breeding easy.
4. Peas are annual plants and thus the results obtained were quick.
5. Peas require lesser span of the land for growth, so many plants could be analyzed in a small garden.
6. Since Mendel was doing such an experiment for the first time, we can also say that pea plants are good to look at and can be grown in gardens also.

Any plant providing all these factors can be used for the experiment.

Mendel worked on seven pairs of contrasting characters and fortunately those characters were present separately on seven pairs of homologous chromosomes in pea plant. This situation is not easy to obtain in other plants.