Biotechnology plays an important role in our everyday lives. It helps improve our lives in plenty of ways. Biotechnology offers a renewable source of food, energy, and even industrial chemicals and keeps us healthy in our contemporary lives through advanced biotech products. Let's see the importance of biotechnology in our contemporary life.
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| Use of Biotechnology in Our Life |
Why Biotechnology is Important in Our Daily Life?
Biotechnology plays a major role in human well-being. Biotechnology helps improve people's lives in many ways and keeps them healthy in their daily lives through advanced biotechnology products.
Biotechnology utilizes nature's own toolbox and genetic makeup to heal the world and reduce rates of infectious disease, and life-threatening conditions affecting millions around the world.
Biotechnology helps improve yields, lower costs, and reduce pesticide use. It helps the pharmaceutical industry to develop new products and new methods to improve existing ones.
In this article, we will discuss how biotechnology is about to change our lives and what is the importance of biotechnology in our contemporary life?
What is Biotechnology?
Biotechnology is a science that deals with living organisms to produce materials or to provide some services to humans.
Biotechnology is a broad group of modern technologies that use vital organs or parts of them to produce products, such as medicines, food compounds, environmentally friendly chemicals and biofuels.
Biotechnology is the totality of techniques and knowledge associated with the use of living things in production processes arising from recent advances in molecular biology.
Biotechnology harnesses the knowledge of life sciences and their applications for technological and industrial purposes for constructive work in the service of humankind.
Biotechnology is multifaceted science that draws on many other sciences such as applied biophysics, chemistry, microbiology, biochemistry, genetics, physiology, molecular biology, enzymology, analytical chemistry, food science, chemical engineering, industrial microbiology, and others.
Biotechnology has become a broad base for various development programs, and an indication of the extent of scientific and cultural excellence and progress, especially in the field of providing and developing human food and pharmaceutical needs, as well as environmental, economic, and other industries.
Application & Importance of Biotechnology in Human Life
Biotechnology is one of the fields of applied and technological sciences based on the unique properties of biological matter.
Biotechnology can be used in the medical, agricultural, and industrial fields, all of which play an important role in everyday life. Biotechnology offers a renewable source of food, energy, and even industrial chemicals.
Biotechnology can also be used to get rid of toxic and harmful chemicals and materials to help solve environmental problems.
Biotechnology uses enzymes and microorganisms to make biological products in sectors such as food ingredients, chemicals, detergents, biofuels, textiles and paper manufacturing.
Biotechnology can help address many global problems, such as food security, energy security, climate change, aging society, infectious diseases, etc.
Human beings are working on manipulating some living creatures in simple ways that have developed with scientific progress until they have been able to control many organisms.
With the progress of the industrial revolution in the last century, humans are active in using innovative machines to improve the efficiency of traditional biological techniques. This has caused a great leap in the fields of plant and animal production, the production of vaccines, and disease diagnosis....etc.
Among the most important modern technologies are the so-called genetic engineering and Recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology, plant and animal tissue culture, as well as the processing and transferring of genetic codes in animals, improving embryo transfer technology in animals, treating human infertility cases through assisted reproductive technology such as external fertilization (IVF) and using stem cells in cellular therapy, in addition to discovering cloning and cellular fusion methods, and other multiple and different techniques.
Read here: What is Genetic Engineering and How is DNA Used in Genetic Engineering?
Biotechnology enables us to manufacture drugs and industrial chemicals in a cheaper way and with much less pollution.
For thousands of years, people of various civilizations have used these biological processes in a systematic way to make foods, dyes, medicines, fuels, adhesives, paper, and fertilizers.
Now it is possible for bacteria to make human protein, secrete plastic, produce antifreeze, digest sawdust and turn it into edible protein, live on petroleum waste, decompose herbicides, extract minerals from seawater, and transmit waste. humans to food.
New biotech capabilities have emerged that are directed to the human being himself, whether that is surgery, drugs, artificial generation, genetic adaptation, modification, transfer, isolation, purification, grafting, fusion, and other things that fall within the scope of Biomedical Engineering. It is possible to identify four distinct stages of this biological revolution:
1. Molecular Biology: It is a science that attempts to understand the mechanisms of life at the level of molecules and the interaction between them.
2. Cell Biology: It is not limited to the study of the relationships within the cells themselves, but also includes the basic study of the relationships between cells to each other. This is because cells form a community within tissues, as they communicate with each other by exchanging signals that are known as Cell surface receptors.
3. Neuro-endocrinology: It concerns the connection of organs and systems with each other and the coordination of their functions through the integration between the nervous system and the endocrine system.
4. Genetic Engineering: Also called recombinant DNA technology. This stage is considered the latest stage of the biological revolution and the most attractive and controversial among scientists. This new biotechnology allows us to reprogram the molecular and cellular interactions discovered during earlier stages of the biological revolution.
Science can, through genetic engineering, affect life directly, as well as affect heredity and the types of living organisms.
Read here: Application of Bioinformatics in Genetic Engineering
Biotechnology has developed radically since the early seventies, and its activities have expanded and diversified.
Genetic engineering became possible with the discovery of polymerase enzymes, Restriction enzymes (DNA-cutting enzymes), Reverse transcriptase enzymes, and others. Enzymes revolutionized the bioproduction of value-added compounds and accelerated the circulation and intake of genetic material in an integrated scheme to reach a specific goal.
Enzymes helped the geneticists to put the genetic material on the operating table to become subject to change in quantity and quality so that passages are deleted from it or added to it and reformulated so that it expresses itself in a new way, which is what is called Gene vaccine.
Gene vaccines are a new approach to immunization and immunotherapy. Gene-Based Vaccine is a contemporary trend in biology that crystallized during the past few decades, as it works to control genetic traits, both quantitatively and qualitatively, more than all other methods such as selection, cross-breeding, and mutagenesis.
The biggest leaps that led to the advancement of the science of biotechnology were the developments that took place in the field of genetic engineering and the emergence of DNA recombinant technology.
The emergence of genetic engineering began in the early seventies of the twentieth century. Genetic engineering involves inserting foreign genes into the cells of microbes to turn them into laboratories for the manufacture of protein.
Modern biotechnology relies mainly on genetically engineered microbes that molecular biologists use to transform them into factories for the production of food, chemicals, drugs and fuels.
The science of biotechnology focuses mainly on the good knowledge of human genes and their ability to change them through the use of genetic engineering techniques.
Now, scientists can extract any gene from any living organism and then genetically program it by using genetic engineering technology, changing it for the better, and then returning it back to the main organism or another organism.
Biotechnology has also created many applications that have effectively contributed to the development of decisive solutions to many of the problems of modern man Such as the production of food, the production of non-traditional feed from cheap sources, the production of alternative sources of energy, the production of some drugs, medicines and many pharmaceutical materials, the disposal of waste and the preservation of the environment.
Scientists in this era have unanimously agreed that biotechnology is the only way to develop and modernize agriculture worldwide.
The use of genetic engineering has led to the physiological and biochemical control of living organisms, whether plant or animal, during their growth or during other subsequent processes to which plants and fruits are exposed after harvest.
The use of genetic engineering technology has made it possible to extend the shelf life and storage and delay microbial infection of agricultural products.
Scientists have recently isolated and modified certain genes, and then reintroduced them into plants to obtain genetically modified crops characterized by high-value traits.
The use of combined biotechnology methods will help advance agricultural growth and progress globally. Agricultural biotechnology ensures food security, reduces the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and eliminates energy consumption in agricultural operations.
Read More:
1. The Importance of Biotechnology in Agriculture
2. Applications of Nanotechnology in Biology and Medicine
3. What is DNA Data Storage and How DNA Digital Data Storage Works?