If your still interested in pea breeding, then you might be interested in Rebsie Fairholm's breeding projects involving peas. Not only is she breeding a very neat yellow sugar snap pea called Luna Trick, but she is also breeding an awesome red-podded pea as well! She not only shares photos and info about her crosses on her blog, but she has also provided 2 excellent tutorials for crossing peas with photos!

Trying to figure out the gentics for this rare red-podded pea is facinationg! Here are my attemopts to figure it all out with punnett squares below.

    But as it turns out, Rebsie's results actually had mostly green pods. And upon doing some research about the genes responsible for the purple-podded trait, we actually find that there may instead be 3 genes needed for the anthocyanins to be present. One gene commonly called "A" is a master swich gene and is epistatic to the other genes coding for anthocyanins. The other two genes are also both required for the pod to have purple-pod's. If this is correct than that means the punnit squares i completed above are no where close to being accurate. Here is the F1 hypothesis again, and this one as far as i know is correct this time. I have used the letter "A" to represent the on/off gene, along with "P" and "U" to represent the two purple-pod genes. I have left out the yellow podded gene because all offspring will be hetozygous for a base pod color of yellow/green.

Here is the corrected F1 generation hypothesis using the three genes for purple anthocyanin colors. We are ignoring the gene for green/yellow pods for the moment since all offspring in the F1 generation are heterozygous for dominant green and recessive yellow.

That gives us a ratio of 28 Purple : 36 Green.
So I guess Rebsie was right; in the F1 generation mostly green pods appear.

    Here is the F2 Generation Hypothesis using the rule of independent assortment. Now this table is not entirely correct, but represents the "average" offspring collected from the purple-podded plants in the F1 generation. I say the average because in the best case scenario you can get purple-podded plants that be homozygous for ALL of the purple genes. On the other hand, the worst case scenario is that the purple-podded plants in the F1 will be heterozygous for ALL of the purple genes. In most cases though i think that the average purple-podded plant in the F1 will have two homozygous genes and the third gene will be heterozygous. In that case you would only need to worry about two sets of genes in the F2, nameley 1 set for anthocyanin colors and 1 set for yellow pods underneath.

Pea flowers (the edible kind) come in three major colors. They can come in the "wild" form which is a Bicolour Purple, White, or Salmon Pink (pink-and-white). I first encountered this information on Rebsie's blog, and after doing some research of my own, i found one refrence to the same imformation in a very old book from 1912 (Breeding and the Mendelian discovery by A.D. Darbishire). The purple form is dominant and is a trait mostly common in field peas. The pink form is recessive to the the purple, but is dominant to the white. The white form is recessive to all color, and is commonly associated with modern peas that have been selected for high sugar content. It's a bit amusing the way the book talks about the purple form in relation to the other two. Apparently if you breed the pink with the white you will get purple in the F1 generation because the pink has the gene that expresses color, but the white is actually hiding the gene for purple flowers. In the book this is talked about as an ancestral trait, a throwback, and the theory of reversion.

In Darwins book, The Origin of Species, Darwin himself encounters something similar with his breeding of pigeons. Darwin bred a pure white pigeon with another white pigeon (with black tail feathers), and was very surprised because in the next generation he got a blue pigeon (which has the same coloring as the wild rock pigeon). But Darwin didn't know about genetics, so he could only conclude that it was a ancestral throwback phenomenon. We now know that the white one with black stripes had the gene for color (black) and the pure white pidgeon was actually a blue pidgeon but did not have any active color genes. To my knowlwdge the only variety of pea known to have pink flowers is the one called 'Salmon-flowered'.