Difference Between Genetics and Genomics

Genetics vs Genomics
 

Genetics and genomics are very closely related fields in biology, yet there are many differences between each other. For an average person, these two fields are much similar and an exact difference between genetics and genomics may not be pulled out from him or her. Therefore, it would be important to follow some basic information about these fields to understand better. An overview about genetics would, however, suggest that genomics as one of its branches, but there is a vast context in genomics. This article attempts to summarize the most important and interesting differences between genetics and genomics, in addition to the provided information about those.

Genetics

Genetics is a biological discipline that studies the inheritance and variation of genes in living organisms. The behaviours and properties of genes along with the molecular structure are studied in genetics. Additionally, the patterns of heredity of genes among generations and genetic diversity are major interests of the field of genetics. Genetics has its branches distributed in almost all the biological disciplines including medicine and agriculture.

The founder of the modern genetics is Gregor Mendel, who has observed discrete units of inheritance (now known as genes) are passed through generations. Gregor Mendel also explained the mechanisms of inheritance through a series of theories. The Mendelian genetics is the classical genetics but other theories have proven that some of those are against the classical findings.

In genetics, it is interesting to notice that the phenotype or the ultimately expressed trait of an organism is not purely based on the genotype or the genetic code, but the phenotype is expressed with the influence of environmental factors, as well. Therefore, it relates with almost everything that has anything to do with biology. When the overall picture about the genetics is considered, its significance with the biodiversity through genetic diversity could be understood.

Genomics

Genomics is a discipline that studies the genomes of organisms. In other words, the nucleotide sequences of DNA or RNA strands are studied in genomics. Usually, this discipline attempts to determine the entire nucleotide sequence in nucleic acids of organisms. In addition, the relationships and interactions within the genome are studied in genomics. Mainly this discipline deals with the studies of bacteriophage, cyanobacteria, humans, environmental samples, and pharmacological applications.

However, there are a number of other applications and dealings for the field of genomics. As each nucleotide sequence in the genes code for proteins, and thereby the properties of each protein is determined by genes, the study of genes and its code has a great potential in identifying important DNA sequences for various applications. However, the exact function of each sequence would be extremely difficult to find out due to the super complexity of the processes.