Biotechnology is technology based on biology, especially when used in agriculture, food science, and medicine. The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity has come up with one of many definitions of biotechnology "Biotechnology has contributed towards the exploitation of biological organisms or biological processes through modern techniques, which could be profitably used in medicine, agriculture, animal husbandry and environmental cloning.Biotechnology is a popular term for the generic technology of the st century. Although it has been utilized for centuries in traditional production processes, modern biotechnology is onlyyears old and in the last decades it has been witnessing tremendous developments. Bioengineering is the science upon which all Biotechnological applications are based. With the development of new approaches and modern techniques, traditional biotechnology industries are also acquiring new horizons enabling them to improve the quality of their products and increase the productivity of their systems.Before , the term, biotechnology, was primarily used in the food processing and agriculture industries. Since the s, it began to be used by the Western scientific establishment to refer to laboratorybased techniques being developed in biological research, such as recombinant DNA or tissue culturebased processes. In fact, the term should be used in a much broader sense to describe the whole range of methods, both ancient and modern, used to manipulate organic materials to reach the demands of food production. So the term could be defined as, "The application of indigenous and/or scientific knowledge to the management of parts of microorganisms, or of cells and tissues of higher organisms, so that these supply goods and services of use to the food industry and its consumers.
History of Biotechnology The most practical use of biotechnology, which is still present today, is the cultivation of plants to produce food suitable to humans. Agriculture has been theorized to have become the dominant way of producing food since the Neolithic Revolution. The processes and methods of agriculture have been refined by other mechanical and biological sciences since its inception. Through early biotechnology farmers were able to select the best suited and highestyield crops to produce enough food to support a growing population. Other uses of biotechnology were required as crops and fields became increasingly large and difficult to maintain. Specific organisms and organism byproducts were used to fertilize, restore nitrogen, and control pests. Throughout the use of agriculture farmers have inadvertently altered the genetics of their crops through introducing them to new environments and breeding them with other plantsone of the first forms of biotechnology. Cultures such as those in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Iran developed the process of brewing beer. It is still done by the same basic method of using malted grains containing enzymes to convert starch from grains into sugar and then adding specific yeasts to produce beer. In this process the carbohydrates in the grains were broken down into alcohols such as ethanol. Later other cultures produced the process of Lactic acid fermentation which allowed the fermentation and preservation of other forms of food. Fermentation was also used in this time period to produce leavened bread. Although the process of fermentation was not fully understood until Louis Pasteur’s work in , it is still the first use of biotechnology to convert a food source into another form.
Combinations of plants and other organisms were used as medications in many early civilizations. Since as early asBC, people began to use disabled or minute amounts of infectious agents to immunize themselves against infections. These and similar processes have been refined in modern medicine and have lead to many developments such as antibiotics, vaccines, and other methods of fighting sickness.In the early twentieth century scientists gained a greater understanding of microbiology and explored ways of manufacturing specific products. In , Chaim Weizmann first used a pure microbiological culture in an industrial process, that of manufacturing corn starch using Clostridium acetobutylicum to produce acetone, which the United Kingdom desperately needed to manufacture explosives during World War I.The field of modern biotechnology is thought to have largely begun on June , , when the United States Supreme Court ruled that a geneticallymodified microorganism could be patented in the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty. Indianborn Ananda Chakrabarty, working for General Electric, had developed a bacterium derived from the Pseudomonas genus capable of breaking down crude oil, which he proposed to use in treating oil spills. A university in Florida is now studying ways to prevent tooth decay. They altered the bacteria in the tooth called Streptococcus mutans by stripping it down so it could not produce lactic acid.
Applications Biotechnology has applications in four major industrial areas, including health care, crop production and agriculture, non food uses of crops e.g. biodegradable plastics, vegetable oil, biofuels, and environmental uses. For , one application of biotechnology is the directed use of organisms for the manufacture of organic products s include beer and milk products. Anotheris using naturally present bacteria by the mining industry in bioleaching. Biotechnology is also used to recycle, treat waste, clean up sites contaminated by industrial activities bioremediation, and also to produce biological weapons.Red biotechnology is applied to medical processes. Some s are the designing of organisms to produce antibiotics, and the engineering of genetic cures through genomic manipulation.White biotechnology , also known as industrial biotechnology, is biotechnology applied to industrial processes. Anis the designing of an organism to produce a useful chemical. Anotheris the using of enzymes as industrial catalysts to either produce valuable chemicals or destroy hazardous/polluting chemicals s using oxidoreductases are given in Feng Xu“Applications of oxidoreductases Recent progress” Ind. Biotechnol. ,. White biotechnology tends to consume less in resources than traditional processes used to produce industrial goods.Green biotechnology is biotechnology applied to agricultural processes. Anis the designing of transgenic plants to grow under specific environmental conditions or in the presence or absence of certain agricultural chemicals. One hope is that green biotechnology might produce more environmentally friendly solutions than traditional industrial agriculture. Anof this is the engineering of a plant to express a pesticide, thereby eliminating the need for external application of pesticides. Anof this would be Bt corn. Whether or not green biotechnology products such as this are ultimately more environmentally friendly is a topic of considerable debate.The term blue biotechnology has also been used to describe the marine and aquatic applications of biotechnology, but its use is relatively rare.The investments and economic output of all of these types of applied biotechnologies form what has been described as the bioeconomy. Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field which addresses biological problems using computational techniques, and makes the rapid organization and analysis of biological data possible. The field may also be referred to as computational biology, and can be defined as, "conceptualizing biology in terms of molecules and then applying informatics techniques to understand and organize the information associated with these molecules, on a large scale." Bioinformatics plays a key role in various areas, such as functional genomics, structural genomics, and proteomics, and forms a key component in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical sector. Pharmacogenomics Pharmacogenomics is the study of how the genetic inheritance of an individual affects his/her body’s response to drugs. It is a coined word derived from the words “pharmacology” and “genomics”. It is hence the study of the relationship between pharmaceuticals and genetics. The vision of pharmacogenomics is to be able to design and produce drugs that are adapted to each person’s genetic makeup.Pharmacogenomics results in the following benefits Development of tailormade medicines. Using pharmacogenomics, pharmaceutical companies can create drugs based on the proteins, enzymes and RNA molecules that are associated with specific genes and diseases. These tailormade drugs promise not only to maximize therapeutic effects but also to decrease damage to nearby healthy cells.
More accurate methods of determining appropriate drug dosages. Knowing a patient’s genetics will enable doctors to determine how well his/ her body can process and metabolize a medicine. This will maximize the value of the medicine and decrease the likelihood of overdose.Ã Improvements in the drug discovery and approval process. The discovery of potential therapies will be made easier using genome targets. Genes have been associated with numerous diseases and disorders. With modern biotechnology, these genes can be used as targets for the development of effective new therapies, which could significantly shorten the drug discovery process. Better vaccines. Safer vaccines can be designed and produced by organisms transformed by means of genetic engineering. These vaccines will elicit the immune response without the attendant risks of infection. They will be inexpensive, stable, easy to store, and capable of being engineered to carry several strains of pathogen at once. Pharmaceutical products Traditional pharmaceutical drugs are relatively simple molecules that have been found primarily through trial and error to treat the symptoms of a disease or illness. Biopharmaceuticals are large biological molecules known as proteins and these target the underlying mechanisms and pathways of a malady; it is a relatively young industry. They can deal with targets in humans that are not accessible with traditional medicines. A patient typically is dosed with a small molecule via a tablet while a large molecule is typically injected.Small molecules are manufactured by chemistry but large molecules are created by living cells for , bacteria cells, yeast cell, and animal cells.Modern biotechnology is often associated with the use of genetically altered microorganisms such as E. coli or yeast for the production of substances like insulin or antibiotics. It can also refer to transgenic animals or transgenic plants, such as Bt corn. Genetically altered mammalian cells, such as Chinese Hamster Ovary CHO cells, are also widely used to manufacture pharmaceuticals. Another promising new biotechnology application is the development of plantmade pharmaceuticals. Herceptin Biotechnology is also commonly associated with landmark breakthroughs in new medical therapies to treat diabetes, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, cancers, arthritis, haemophilia, bone fractures, multiple sclerosis, cardiovascular as well as molecular diagnostic devices than can be used to define the patient population. Herceptin, is the first drug approved for use with a matching diagnostic test and is used to treat breast cancer in women whose cancer cells express the protein HER Modern biotechnology can be used to manufacture existing drugs more easily and cheaply. The first genetically engineered products were medicines designed to combat human diseases. To cite one , inGenentech joined a gene for insulin and a plasmid vector and put the resulting gene into a bacterium called Escherichia coli. Insulin, widely used for the treatment of diabetes, was previously extracted from the pancreas of bovines and pigs. It was very expensive and often elicited unwanted allergic responses. The resulting genetically engineered bacterium enabled the production of vast quantities of human insulin at low cost.Since then modern biotechnology has made it possible to produce more easily and cheaply human growth hormone, clotting factors for hemophiliacs, fertility drugs, erythropoietin and other drugs. Most drugs today are based on aboutmolecular targets. Genomic knowledge of the genes involved in diseases, disease pathways, and drugresponse sites are expected to lead to the discovery of thousands more new targets.
Genetic testing Genetic testing involves the direct examination of the DNA molecule itself. A scientist scans a patient’s DNA sample for mutated sequences.There are two major types of gene tests. In the first type, a researcher may design short pieces of DNA “probes” whose sequences are complementary to the mutated sequences. These probes will seek their complement among the base pairs of an individual’s genome. If the mutated sequence is present in the patient’s genome, the probe will bind to it and flag the mutation. In the second type, a researcher may conduct the gene test by comparing the sequence of DNA bases in a patient’s gene to a normal version of the gene.
Some genetic tests are already available, although most of them are used in developed countries. The tests currently available can detect mutations associated with rare genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, and Huntington’s disease. Recently, tests have been developed to detect mutation for a handful of more complex conditions such as breast, ovarian, and colon cancers. However, gene tests may not detect every mutation associated with a particular condition because many are as yet undiscovered, and the ones they do detect may present different risks to different people and populations.
Gene therapy Gene therapy may be used for treating, or even curing, genetic and acquired diseases like cancer and AIDS by using normal genes to supplement or replace defective genes or to bolster a normal function such as immunity. It can be used to target somatic body or germ egg and sperm cells. In somatic gene therapy, the genome of the recipient is changed, but this change is not passed along to the next generation. In contrast, in germline gene therapy, the egg and sperm cells of the parents are changed for the purpose of passing on the changes to their offspring. Ex vivo, which means “outside the body” Cells from the patient’s blood or bone marrow are removed and grown in the laboratory. They are then exposed to a virus carrying the desired gene. The virus enters the cells, and the desired gene becomes part of the DNA of the cells. The cells are allowed to grow in the laboratory before being returned to the patient by injection into a vein. In vivo, which means “inside the body” No cells are removed from the patient’s body. Instead, vectors are used to deliver the desired gene to cells in the patient’s body.Currently, the use of gene therapy is limited. Somatic gene therapy is primarily at the experimental stage. Germline therapy is the subject of much discussion but it is not being actively investigated in larger animals and human beings.As of June , more thanclinical genetherapy trials involving about , patients have been identified worldwide. Aroundof these are in the United States, with Europe havingThese trials focus on various types of cancer, although other multigenic diseases are being studied as well. Recently, two children born with severe combined immunodeficiency disorder “SCID” were reported to have been cured after being given genetically engineered cells.Gene therapy faces many obstacles before it can become a practical approach for treating disease. At least four of these obstacles are as follows Gene delivery tools. Genes are inserted into the body using gene carriers called vectors. The most common vectors now are viruses, which have evolved a way of encapsulating and delivering their genes to human cells in a pathogenic manner. Scientists manipulate the genome of the virus by removing the diseasecausing genes and inserting the therapeutic genes. However, while viruses are effective, they can introduce problems like toxicity, immune and inflammatory responses, and gene control and targeting issues.
Limited knowledge of the functions of genes. Scientists currently know the functions of only a few genes. Hence, gene therapy can address only some genes that cause a particular disease. Worse, it is not known exactly whether genes have more than one function, which creates uncertainty as to whether replacing such genes is indeed desirable. Multigene disorders and effect of environment. Most genetic disorders involve more than one gene. Moreover, most diseases involve the interaction of several genes and the environment. For , many people with cancer not only inherit the disease gene for the disorder, but may have also failed to inherit specific tumor suppressor genes. Diet, exercise, smoking and other environmental factors may have also contributed to their disease. High costs. Since gene therapy is relatively new and at an experimental stage, it is an expensive treatment to undertake. This explains why current studies are focused on illnesses commonly found in developed countries, where more people can afford to pay for treatment. It may take decades before developing countries can take advantage of this technology.
