Applications of Biotechnology in Food and Agriculture
Write an article on applications of biotechnology in food and agriculture Paper must be at least 1500 words. Please, no plagiarized work! Biotechnology can be broadly categorized into two – traditional biotechnology and modern biotechnology. Traditional biotechnology generally refers to the practices that have been there since the beginning of historical records. These include such practices as milk fermentation, winemaking, beer brewing from various raw materials and so on. Modern biotechnology on the other hand encompasses more recent employment of the knowledge amassed from molecular biology into the art of biotechnology. These include such things as recombinant DNA or genetic engineering such as to yield transgenic crops like maize, barley, wheat, tomato, tobacco, soybean, cotton and so on (Lerner, 2012).Biotechnology is a very useful field in the modern world and with new technologies still emerging the sky is certainly the limit. There are various other fields yet to be explored. Biotechnology is a multidisciplinary subject linked to numerous other fields such as chemical engineering, protein engineering, in vitro cell cultivation, biophysics, biochemistry, genetics, immunology, microbiology, human/plant/animal philosophy and molecular cell biology.. this, therefore, renders the subject highly applicable in a plethora of human endeavors. Of particular interest are food and agriculture and how biotechnology has influenced and continues to influence matters therein (Smith, 2004).Agriculture has been one of the fields most influenced and impacted by developments in biotechnology with numerous applications stemming forth. For one, biotechnology has been useful in the production of virus/ disease-free plants. Much of the concepts in biotechnology have been used in agriculture to come up with low-cost disease-free planting materials. The culture of single cells and meristems can be effectively used to eradicate pathogens from planting material and thereby dramatically improve the yield of established cultivars. .
