Biotechnologyis not a new discipline, but it is advancing by leaps and bounds and it hasmore and more applications in our day-to-day lives: from pharmaceuticaldevelopment to food production and the treatment of polluting waste. We explorethis exciting field below and try to determine how far it might go in thefuture.
Although weliterally have biotechnology in our genes, it never ceases to amaze us with itscontinuous innovations, almost more akin to science fiction. The revolutionaryspirit of those advances prior to the creation of the term—such as thefermentation of bread, cheese or wine— has remained intact until the presentday, more than 6, 000 years later,Cyagen knock in mouse model just when human beings are wondering what, if any,are the limits of this technology, that could take us a very long way in thefuture.
WHAT ISBIOTECHNOLOGY
Biotechnologyuses living cells to develop or manipulate products for specific purposes, suchas genetically modified foods. Biotechnology is thus linked to geneticengineering and emerged as a field in its own right at the beginning of the20th century in the food industry, which was later joined by other sectors suchas medicine and the environment.
Today, thefive branches into which modern biotechnology is divided — human,environmental, industrial, animal and plant — help us fight hunger and disease,produce more safely, cleanly and efficiently, reduce our ecological footprintand save energy. All of this has excited stock markets like Wall Street, wherebiotech was one of the most profitable sectors of the NASDAQ Composite index in2019.
USES ANDAPPLICATIONS OF BIOTECHNOLOGY
Biotechnologicalinnovations are already part of our daily lives and we find them in pharmaciesand supermarkets, among many other places. In addition, in recent monthsbiotechnology has become one of the spearheads in the fight against theCOVID-19 global pandemic, since it helps to decipher the virus' genome andunderstand how the our body's defence mechanism works against infectiousagents.
