The basis for modern genetics began with the work of Gregor Mendel, who presented his paper, "Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden" ("Experiments on Plant Hybridization"), in 1865,[28] which outlined the principles of biological inheritance, serving as the basis for modern genetics.[29] However, the significance of his work was not realized until the early 20th century when evolution became a unified theory as the modern synthesis reconciled Darwinian evolution with classical genetics.[30] In the 1940s and early 1950s, a series of experiments by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase pointed to DNA as the component of chromosomes that held the trait-carrying units that had become known as genes. A focus on new kinds of model organisms such as viruses and bacteria, along with the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, marked the transition to the era of molecular genetics. From the 1950s to the present times, biology has been vastly extended in the molecular domain.