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BIOTECNIKA BASICS
WHAT
IS BIOTECHNOLOGY?
Biotechnology is technology based on
biology, especially when used in agriculture, food science, and
medicine. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity has come up with
one of many definitions of biotechnology: "Biotechnology means any
technological application that uses biological systems, living
organisms, or derivatives thereof, to make or modify products or
processes for specific use." This definition is at odds with common
usage in the United States, where "biotechnology" generally refers
to recombinant DNA based and/or tissue culture based processes that
have only been commercialized since the 1970s. Thus, in common
usage, modifying plants or animals by breeding, which has been
practiced for thousands of years, would not be considered
biotechnology. This distinction emphasizes that modern, recombinant
DNA based biotechnology is not just a more powerful version of
existing technology, but represents something new and different; for
instance, recombinant DNA biotechnology allows us to take virtually
any gene and express it in any organism; we can take the genes that
make crimson colour in plants and put them into guinea pigs to make
pink pets, or, we can take the genes that make anthrax spores lethal
and put them into wheat or rice. This sort of gene transfer was
virtually impossible with historical processes.
There has been a great deal of talk - and money - poured into
biotechnology with the hope that miracle drugs will appear. While
there do seem to be a small number of efficacious drugs, in general
the Biotech revolution has not happened in the pharmaceutical
sector. However, recent progress with monoclonal antibody based
drugs, such as Genentech's Avastin (tm) suggest that biotech may
finally have found a role in pharmaceutical sales. Biotechnology can
also be defined as the manipulation of organisms to do practical
things and to provide useful products. One aspect of biotechnology
is the directed use of organisms for the manufacture of organic
products (examples include beer and milk products. For another
example, naturally present bacteria are utilized by the mining
industry in bioleaching. Biotechnology is also used to recycle,
treat waste, clean up sites contaminated by industrial activities
(bioremediation), and produce biological weapons. There are also
applications of biotechnology that do not use living organisms.
Examples are DNA microarrays used in genetics and radioactive
tracers used in medicine.
Red biotechnology is applied to medical processes. Some examples are
the designing of organisms to produce antibiotics, and the
engineering of genetic cures through genomic manipulation. White
biotechnology, also known as grey biotechnology, is biotechnology
applied to industrial processes. An example is the designing of an
organism to produce a useful chemical. White biotechnology tends to
consume less in resources than traditional processes used to produce
industrial goods. Green biotechnology is biotechnology applied to
agricultural processes. An example is 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. An example of
this is the engineering of a plant to express a pesticide, thereby
eliminating the need for external application of pesticides. An
example of 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. Bioinformatics is an
interdisciplinary field which addresses biological problems using
computational techniques. The field is also often referred to as
computational biology. It 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. The
term blue biotechnology has also been used to describe the marine
and aquatic applications of biotechnology, but its use is relatively
rare.
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