From omics to systems biology: exploring the mystery box of microbial life

Microbial molecular biology has traditionally used very reductionist approaches; for example, find a gene of interest, clone it or knock it out and see if you can detect a phenotype. The genomics era has opened up the possibility of analysing microbes and communities at a systems level by combining igh-throughput experimental data from genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and phenomic techniques. This parallels earlier reductionist approaches by going from DNA to RNA to protein to phenotype, albeit on a global rather than individual gene scale.