Figure 3

Schematic representation of genomics/genome-wide association studies and traditional microbial genetics strategies. The top-down approach [6] (genomics/genome-wide association studies (GWASs) typically begins with a pool of sequenced genomes and attempts to discover genes that are associated with a particular phenotype. Bottom-up approaches (molecular genetics) perform experiments to prove or disprove hypotheses about the function of particular genes or regions of the genome. These approaches can be integrated when knowledge gained from molecular genetics is used to validate unbiased GWASs- and genomics-based experiments.