There is
a longstanding tension within agricultural research between, broadly speaking, breeders and physiologists. Breeders seek improvement through selection of varieties combined with plant or animal husbandry appropriate to those varieties. Physiologists focus on determining and manipulating the specific genetic and environmental factors underlying the development of the trait in question. (In this era of genomics, breeders may also be physiologists, but let [us]continue distinguishing the two ideal types.) Breeders are not uninterested in the underlying factors. They make hypotheses about such factors based on… trials [of multiple varieties grown in multiple locations] as well as sources other than the data analysis, then use these hypotheses to plan the next set of varieties and locations on which to collect data… Physiologists make much less use of variety-location trials to generate hypotheses; instead they focus on experiments under controlled conditions. Since the advent of DNA technologies, their experiments have included…
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Whys To Look For Genes: Pros and Complications 