From the early beginnings of molecular biology physicists have played a major role in its development starting with Schrödinger's 'What is Life?' which introduced the idea of an ‘aperiodic crystal’ as a repository of genetic information. As biology becomes more quantitative with the advent of technologies such as high throughput sequencing, physicists have found themselves attracted by the challenges in biological systems that could be unraveled with the vast amounts of information now coming online. In this talk, I will describe one such problem in biology and my approach toward its solution. A long standing goal in biology is to understand which genomic regions or genes (genotype) are involved in the expression of a given observable trait. I will describe two methods that could be used to correlate a genomic region with a given trait while taking the evolutionary history of the species or organisms into account. The first method correlates a binary or discrete character (such as eye color or presence/absence of a character) with a genotype. The applicability of this method is demonstrated by its use to find genes correlated with susceptibility to anthrax in mice. The limitation of this method to discrete characters is significant as most characters in nature are continuous (such as height). We develop a method that can be used to find correlations between a continuous character and a genotype while taking the evolutionary history into consideration. Randomization testing is used to assess the significance of the correlation. I will present a case study using this method where we find regions in the mice genome that are correlated with response to a high-fat diet. Comparison of our results with literature