What is Agricultural Biotechnology?
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Selective breeding is the process of breeding plants and animals for particular genetic traits. Farmers have been known to breed plants and animals with certain desired characteristics in an attempt to produce offspring with very specific traits. Usually the result of selective breeding is that a certain number of offspring will show the desired trait, and a few will show the undesired characteristic. Agriculture is the practice of growing and harvesting animal or plant crops for food, fuel, fibers, and other useful products. Although selective breeding of livestock and plant crops has been practiced for centuries, new biotechnology techniques are being applied to improve the quantity and quality of agricultural products in a much faster process. Some of these techniques include genetic testing, PTC, DNA manipulation and gene transfer, protein manipulations, genetic engineering, and plant and animal cloning. |
There are several advantages to engineering plants to make human proteins: Plants are easy to grow in large numbers. It is more costly to produce human proteins in bacterial fermentation. Plants are eukaryotic and plant cells are equipped to assemble complicated eukaryotic proteins like antibiotics and some enzymes. This can help scientist to produce a wide range of therapeutic antibodies, enzymes, or hormones in plants. “To isolate genomic DNA from the rest of the cell, you must burst the cell open usually with lysis, remove the proteins of the cell and the RNA should be destroyed (with a protein degrading buffer) and the remaining DNA (supernatant) is precipitated out of solution with ethanol or isopropanol. Isolating gDNA requires plenty of buffers and reagents. When DNA is extracted, it can be run on a gel to confirm its presence and see what its concentration is.” (Biotechnology by Ellyn Daugherty) |
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