What are the advantages of biotechnology?

The data is at hand and there are scientific facts that support it.

Although food biotechnology continues to evolve like many sciences, it has been producing better products for human consumption for more than 40 years.

Here we present 10 advantages of genetically modified foods:

• Improve nutrition and health

Thanks to biotechnology you can add nutrients and enrich foods.

• Its consumption is safe for people

In 40 years of biotechnological research there is no documented evidence of damage to the human organism.

• Agriculture based on biotechnology is sustainable

It has a lower environmental impact than traditional agriculture due to the reduction of carbon emissions through direct seeding.

• Genetically modified crops help poorer farmers

Thanks to more resistant seeds they have better harvests and sell their product better.

They need less inputs to take care of their crops.

• Most of the genetically modified foods that arrive at your table were grown with fewer pesticides

By creating more pest-resistant plants, the need to use pesticides to protect crops is reduced.

• Increase crop yield

The productivity in GM crops is between 7% and 20% higher than in traditional agriculture, and 33% higher than organic crops.

• Food biotechnology helps mitigate the hunger crisis in the world

Over the past 15 years, it has helped farmers produce 311.8 million more tons of food.

• Food biotechnology has benefited the global economy

The applications of biotechnology in the agri-food chain represent the highest economic importance on a global scale.

Biotechnology research and development has generated thousands of patents on plants and processes based on them to universities and companies around the world, while linking productive food chains to biotechnology.

( Situation of biotechnology in the world , Pages 12 and 13, Center for Research in Applied Biotechnology-IPN).

• Some GM foods help reduce food waste

With foods that resist more time in good condition, there are fewer fruits and vegetables that are thrown away before being consumed.

• Cheaper production of food

Which translates into better prices for final consumers.

What is CRISPR/Cas9? What can it do?

CRISPR is actually a naturally-occurring, ancient defense mechanism found in a wide range of bacteria. As far as back the 1980s, scientists observed a strange pattern in some bacterial genomes. One DNA sequence would be repeated over and over again, with unique sequences in between the repeats. They called this odd configuration as Clustered Regulary Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR). Originally in 1970s while studying several archae and eubacteria, the scientists came ac-cross such repeats which they called as Short Regularly Spaced Repeats (SRSR). Later in 2000s the clustered nature of these sequences was revealed and thus being named as CRISPR (read as crisper). The further studies revealed that these sequences play a major role to defend bacteria from any phage infection, i.e. in bacterial adaptive immunity.

As I have mentioned earlier, these are short stretches of DNA sequences in bacterial genomes, wherein the bacteria have already encountered any phage invasion in earlier time. These sequences are short repeats mostly 20-50 bp in size and are separated by a 'spacer sequence' which is an artifact of previous phage invasion, i.e. the spacer sequence is a part of phage DNA sequence thus end up protecting bacteria from any subsequent phage invasion.

Such a dyad sequence-structure of the CRISPR loci, leads to formation of hairpin loop like secondary structure although the entire sequence might not be completely palindromic. These repeats are separated by uniform length spacers. In most of the cases the spacer sequences are much identical to the phage DNA sequences. In certain cases the spacer sequence can be identical to prokaryotic DNA sequences making them self targetting.

The CRISPRs are just one part of this bacterial immune system. The other significant counterpart is the CRISPR-associated genes (Cas genes) these genes code for several nucleases. These Cas proteins owing to their nuclease activity can slice any Nucleic Acid sequence. But now the question comes is, what is so special about this system?

So coming to Cas9, Cas9 is widely used nuclease and famous among scientists (albeit notorious amongst the phages ;-) ) and was isolated first from Spy bacteria or full name Streptococcus pyogenes. Now that we know what is the native role of CRISPR/Cas9 system, lets just think for what wonders it may do.

Connecting the dots:

Cas9 is a nuclease which cuts/snips the DNA whereas the CRISPR is a set of sequences which guide the Cas9 as of where to exactly snip the DNA. So since DNA is quite a long stretch of nucleotides A, T, G, C the CRISPR has to guide the Cas9 to some specific 20bp sequence (Cas9 identifies a stretch of 20bp sequence). So all that we biologists do is we study the part of DNA sequence which we want to snip/effiencently engineer, and design a "CRISPR guide RNA" which has the 20bp sequence similar to the target sequence and a tracer RNA sequence for recruitment and snipping purpose os Cas9 protein. SO all one needs to do is design this CRISPR guide RNA sequence and order it cloned inside a suitable vector (usually a plasmid). Upon transfection in to the cells the CRISPR guide RNA and Cas9 shall do their work quite efficiently. Alternatively you can also design a corrected sequence of certain faulty gene (usually in oligo-nucleotide form)  and co-transfect it into suitable organism/cell lines harbouring the faulty gene of internest. This shall lead to removal of faulty part from the gene and insertion of the correct part.

Similarly this system can be also used to effectively generate mutant varieties of particular gene for biological experiments. The traditional processes fail to do so with efficiency and require mostly a lot of breeding and may even cost several mice their lives and is time consuming too. The CRISPR system can be used efficiently to mutate any gene of interest and that too with good reproducibilty. Moreover this system can be used to manipulate any organism genome including that of humans.

The only con behind this technique is the off-targetting, that is the Cas9 might also snip a 20bp region which matches the Guide RNA sequence but is not somewhere else in the genome. Various people have been trying to optimise this artifact of off-targets by several computation approaches as well as using different Cas variants of Cpf variants. I wont go there since it is entirely different question to address.

You can refer to this link which tells one of the succesful human treatments by the CRISPR/Cas9 system - A Cell Therapy Untested in Humans Saves a Baby With Cancer

What's the future of biotechnology?

In order to answer this, one need only look at the technologies that are presently treated as theoretically possible but difficult to implement.

Regenerative Medicine

A lot of research is moving this to fruition. Every few months, some stem cell derived organ has been grown, shown to work or implanted for the first time; lungs, livers, kidneys, tracheae are a few of a very long list. 

When this has fully matured, organ farms will be able to grow or even print any fully functional organ and have it ready for implantation in weeks. This will dramatically increase life expectancy and quality. Thousands of people dieevery year waiting for an organ donor. Even those who get the organ they need live a perilous, uncomfortable life on immunosuppressant drugs. Regenerative medicine will end this death and suffering.

Synthetic Biology

We have woken on this planet and found ourselves surrounded by intractably complex, ancient machines all buzzing away to fulfill some billion year old programming. What if we could unravel their nightmarishly unreadable code so to write new algorithms for them or dictate entirely new forms for them? What if we could even reverse engineer them in order to compile a whole new language to work with?

This is already being done in a variety of industries. We genetically engineer plants to carry vitamins or be pest resistant, so we don't need to use pesticide. Since the 1970s, the insulin we give diabetics has come from genetically modified yeast. What if we could engineer bacteria to scrub the air of our pollutants and turn them into fuel or plastics. 

When this is mature, we'll do more than just swapping pre-existant genes between organisms for neat combinatorial affects; we'll be working from scratch. If we come to solve the protein folding problem, we'll be able to design and mass produce novel enzymes not otherwise found in nature for any conceivable effect. We may see problems that cannot be easily solved with conventional biology and design whole new genetic languages with new base pairs and amino acids custom built to the problems of tomorrow.

Iterated Embryo Selection (IES)

Imagine if you could run a successful, regimented eugenics program for 300 years, selecting who breeds with whom and ignoring any ethical objections. It's an untenable effort, but this new technique would allow it to be done in months with few of the ethical qualms. The idea is genius.

Take stem cells from as many volunteers as you like and cause them to differentiate into as many sperm and egg as you will. Fertilize the eggs with the sperm to form zygotes. Sequence the DNA of the zygotes and identify which candidate zygotes possess as much of some trait that you want to select for -- intelligence, for example. 

In in vitro fertilization (IVF), this would be where you implanted the selected zygote(s) into a prospective mother -- not in IES. Instead, take stem cells from the best zygotes and stimulate those stem cells to differentiate into sperm and egg. Fertilize the eggs with the sperm and repeat the process to your satisfaction and then implant the final zygote at the end of the iterative process into a prospective mother.

This technique will let us perform evolution in vitro by skipping the 20 years that it naturally takes for generational turnover. The effects of this can be profound. If we could correctly identify the genetic corollaries of intelligence and selected for those, we might be able to achieve gains higher than 300 IQ points in a single generation.

This may be the single most impactful technique in biotech since the polymerase chain reaction.

Biological Computing

At its core, biological systems are information systems. They store information, transmit it, code, decode, scramble it. They behave according to a complex array of logic gates, so is it any surprise that we could conceivably 
manipulate biomolecules and even whole organisms into computers?

DNA has been engineered into a high density, super low error data storage device.  Living cells can be rigged into behaving like transistors, fulfilling algorithmic routines normally only seen in computer code (IF, AND, OR statements). We can do the same thing  using enzymes or even DNA itself. 

This approach to computing has drawbacks but also benefits. Chemical pathways tend to be slow compared to silicon computing, not producing results for minutes or hours. However, biological computers have the capacity to be massively parallel, which lends itself to certain categories of computing problems. Also, cells and enzymes have their own actuators; not only can they compute a result, they can then physically move things around based on that result. We eventually want molecular scale nanobots that can assemble things for us, monitor and maintain our health, but the hardware for these poses enormous engineering hurdles. Living cells provide premade hardware; we only need to give them the right software.

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Why is biotechnology important to agriculture?

Biotechnology will save the hungry people in the Plants instance soon it will be possible ti grow corn in dry conditions without worrying about insect and pests as well as growing and maturing at an astounding rate making it possible to get more than one crop per season.
In addition you will not have to fertilize as the stocks will self fertilize the soil

Now, beforehand we start screaming franken food let me point out that if you're starving you could care less what you get in food. Hunger and starvation Will KILL YOU

Biotechnology play a major role in agriculture for improving the productivity in different ways as environment become unpredictable day by day. And agriculture land also decreasing due to population so here biotechnologist are working in different scientific research such as making different fertilizer, agri input , trying to develop new variety of seed , desease less plant which can able to grow in today's environment

Farmers Benefit from Agricultural Biotechnology Seeds. Decades of documented evidence demonstrates that agricultural biotechnology is a safe and beneficial technology that contributes to both environmental and economic sustainability. Farmers choose biotech crops because they increase yield and lower production costs. Biotechnology has helped improve food quality, quantity and processing. It also has applications in manufacturing, where simple cells and proteins can be manipulated to produce chemicals. But biotechnology is most important for its implications in health and medicine.

What is the main difference between biotechnology and genetic engineering?

Biotechnology is more of an umbrella term under which genetic engineering falls.

Biotechnology is basically the integration of bio-science with technology while Genetic engineering is manipulating DNA of an organism.

Biotechnology is a research oriented science that combines biology and technology.

Genetic engineering is manipulation of genetic material (DNA) of a living organism via artificial methods.

Often genetic engineering plays a part in biotech, but it is far from the only aspect of biotechnology.

Basically, biotechnology is a more general term. It is a wide field of science that involves the integration and application of technological tools in biological science to produce a product that may improve the quality of human life.

Bio-Technology has a large array Of of function to nano-robotics, Artificial Intellect, advance in artificial limb creation and more.

Genetic engineering is one of the many tools of biotechnology that involves direct manipulation of DNA to alter (enhance) an organism’s characteristic.

Genetic engineering is a term that actually refers to a general laboratory process through which living beings are fine tuned for research and commercial purposes.

Biotechnology on the other hand, is making use of the findings gathered by genetic engineering. So, biotechnology refers to a quite old discipline which started with manipulation of living beings to make useful stuff (no direct manipulation on DNA is required for this) such as agriculture and brewing.

Bio-genetic: Can Alter and Study genome and sequencing, etc!

Biotechnology is best defined as?

The best definition is a big ask. Like the field itself, I think we will also see the definition evolve in time. Here’s my take on the definition, although I’d love a discussion on the subject:

Biotechnology may be defined as the field of study/research/innovation, in which matter (such as genes, cells, macro molecules and metabolites) from previously or currently alive organisms, or even the organism itself, may be utilized to solve problems and create solutions of importance to different stakeholders in a society.

Biotechnology is often used synonymous with gene technology, which in a vague context is OK. Gene technology is however a much narrower definition and is characterized under the definition of Biotechnology.