What is agricultural biotechnology?
Biotechnology refers to any technique that uses living organisms, or parts of these organisms. Such techniques are used to make or modify products for a practical purpose. Modern medicine, agriculture, and industry make use of biotechnology on a large scale.
Traditional biotechnologies such as the use of yeast to make bread or wine have been applied for thousands of years. Since the late 19th century, knowledge of the principles of heredity gave farmers new tools for breeding crops and animals. They selected individual organisms with beneficial characteristics and developed hybrid crops.
New methods have been developed since the discovery of the DNA structure in 1954. For instance, micro-organisms can be used to produce antibiotics, and the hereditary material in plants can be changed to make them resistant to pests or diseases.
How can biotechnology be applied to agriculture?
Genes are the pieces of DNA code which regulate all biological processes in living organisms. The entire set of genetic information of an organism is present in every cell and is called the genome.
The genetic material is structured in a similar way in different species, which makes it easier to identify potentially useful genes. Certain species of crops, livestock, and disease-causing organisms have been studied as model species because they help us understand related organisms.
Certain fragments of DNA that can be easily identified are used to ‘flag’ the position of a particular gene. They can be used to select individual plants or animals carrying beneficial genes and characteristics. Important traits such as fruit yield, wood quality, disease resistance, milk and meat production, or body fat can be traced this way.
Plants can be obtained from small plant samples grown in test tubes. This is a more sophisticated form of the conventional planting of cuttings from existing plants. Another laboratory technique, in vitro selection, involves growing plant cells under adverse conditions to select resistant cells before growing the full plant.
In conventional breeding half of an individual’s genes come from each parent, whereas in genetic engineering one or several specially selected genes are added to the genetic material.
Moreover, conventional plant breeding can only combine closely related plants.
Genetic engineering permits the transfer of genes between organisms that are not normally able to cross breed.
For example a gene from a bacterium can be inserted into a plant cell to provide resistance to insects. Such a transfer produces organisms referred to as genetically modified (GM) or transgenic.
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