Genetics & Genomics

Underlying almost all modern approaches to biology, Genetics is both a fundamental method of inquiry and a discipline in its own right. At Princeton, classical genetics, molecular genetics, and genomics are used to dissect biological mechanisms at all levels of organization, from the simplest viruses and bacteria through simple eukaryotes to the most complex problems in vertebrate development. The commonality of approaches to varied problems provides many opportunities for cross-discipline interaction. Meanwhile, the exponential explosion of complete genomic sequences coupled with the rapidly falling cost of sequencing has opened up new opportunities and challenges for molecular biologists and geneticists. For example, it has become routine experimental practice to comprehensively analyze DNA, RNA, protein, regulation, and mutant phenotypes, facilitating a level of biological inference at the "system level". With the explosion of data, our department has also pioneered the computational analysis of large data sets to extract meaningful insights. Princeton, through its departments and the Lewis-Sigler Institute, has established facilities that make the advancing experimental and analysis technologies available to its research community, so that genome-scale experiments can continue to be designed and executed at the advancing state of the art.