Gregor Mendel, through his work on pea plants, discovered the fundamental laws of inheritance. He deduced that genes come in pairs and are inherited as distinct units, one from each parent. Mendel tracked the segregation of parental genes and their appearance in the offspring as dominant or recessive traits. Gregor Mendel conducted hybridization experiments on around 29,000 pea plants. Peas were an ideal choice for Mendel to use because they had easily observable traits there were 7 of which he could manipulate. He began his experiments on peas with two conditions.