Biotechnology Today

Brief Introduction:

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, theoretically, recombinant DNA biotechnology allows us to take virtually any gene and express it in any organism; we can take the genes that make crimson color in plants and put them into guinea pigs to make pink pets, or, we can take the genes that help arctic fish survive the freezing temperatures and put them into food to increase the amount of time it can grow before it freezes. 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.