Allen Buskirk
Chemists regularly synthesize and characterize one molecule at a time; biochemists make rational mutations to proteins and nucleic acids and study the effects of each single mutation. In contrast, genetic approaches create millions of solutions to a problem at once and sort through them in a high-throughput manner to identify molecules with the desired activity. Genetic methods can also identify key molecules involved in a process of interest when very little information is available about the system.
