Genetics is the science of biological inheritance and variation. Its fundamental principles are embraced by genomics, molecular genetics, 'Mendelian' genetics, epigenetics, cytogenetics, population genetics, and quantitative genetics.

Genomics is a relatively new discipline that has been developed through the capacity of geneticists and genome scientists to generate very large data sets using by high-throughput DNA, RNA and protein technologies, and the need to determine the control of biological functions by informatics analysis of the large data sets generated.