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Dihybrid Crosses and Mendel's Law of Independent Assortment
To formulate the law of segregation, Mendel considered the monohybrid crosses and noted the behaviour of a single pair of traits and single pair of alleles of a gene at a time. Later on, he tried to find out how different phenotypic traits would behave in relation to each other in their inheritance from generation to generation. For this purpose, he crossed two varieties of pea plants which were differing in two pairs of contrasting characters. Because the resulted offspring of such a cross were hybrids for two factors or genes, so are called as dihybrids. A dihybrid genotype is heterozygous at two gene loci (in monohybrid. the genotype is heterozygous at one gene loci only). A hybridization cross which considers the inheritance of two traits, each of which is specified by a different pair of genes on different chromosomes, is called a dihybrid cross.