Developed the process

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 poop plants and other organisms were used as medications in many early civilizations. Since as early as BC 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 led 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 medical crop production and agriculture non food industrial uses of crops and other products . 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. Another is 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. A series of derived terms have been coined to identify several branches of biotechnology for : 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. A rose plant that began as cells grown in a tissue culture A rose plant that began as cells grown in a tissue culture Green biotechnology is biotechnology applied to agricultural processes. An would be the selection and domestication of plants via micropropagation. Another 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 of this is the engineering of a plant to express a pesticide thereby eliminating the need for external application of pesticides. An 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.

          White biotechnology

White biotechnology also known as industrial biotechnology is biotechnology applied to industrial processes. An is the designing of an organism to produce a useful chemical. Another is the using of enzymes as industrial catalysts to either produce valuable chemicals or destroy hazardouspolluting 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. Blue biotechnology is a term that has 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 hisher 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. 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.

          Most traditional pharmaceutical drugs

Computergenerated image of insulin hexamers highlighting the threefold symmetry the zinc ions holding it together and the histidine residues involved in zinc binding. Most 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 usually but not always as is the case with using insulin to treat type diabetes mellitus target the underlying mechanisms and pathways of a malady; it is a relatively young industry. They can deal with targets in humans that may not be 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 such as those found in the human body: for bacteria cells yeast cells animal or plant cells.