 Other branches of biology are informed by molecular biology, by either directly studying the interactions of molecules in their own right such as in cell biology and developmental biology, or indirectly, where molecular techniques are used to infer historical attributes of populations or species, as in fields in evolutionary biology such as population genetics and phylogenetics.There is also a long tradition of studying biomolecules "from the ground up", or molecularly, in biophysics.One of the most basic techniques of molecular biology to study protein function is molecular cloning.