What Is Biotechnology and What Does It Mean to You?

Biotechnology – using living organisms, or the products of living

organisms, for human benefit to make a product or solve a problem.
Historical Examples
 Fermentation
 Selective breeding
 Use of antibiotics

• Modern Examples
– Gene cloning
– Genetic engineering
– Recombinant DNA technology
– Human Genome Project
• Example of "modern" biotechnology:
– recombinant DNA technology started modern biotech as an
industry
–
• Examples of applications
– development of disease-resistant plants
– food crops that produce greater yields
– "golden rice" engineered to be more nutritious
– genetically engineered bacteria that can degrade environmental
pollutants
• Work in groups to come up with more examples of applications

What is the relationship between biotechnology

and biochemistry?
 Bio— Life, Chemistry—-the bits and pieces of how a living thing chemically operates. an
exciting field that would be related to researching perhaps how to make a medicine that
effects an organism (like people) in beneficial ways.

There are diseases and traits we need to study in a detailed way because women carry
the disease or trait, but without that Y chromosome, they pass it on to their sons.
Understanding, in detail, how mitochondrial DNA transmits and expresses those traits:
biochemistry.

REFLECTION:

 Biotechnology is one of the human discoveries that has become widely use in our daily
lives. Now we have figured out how to make a wearable insulin pump that could test
your blood sugar and pump out insulin when needed, not flood your body with an
injection two or three times a day or ice trays are no longer these stiff things that you
have to wrench a handle to break the ice enough to get it out of the tray. These are some
products of biotechnology combined with biochemistry. I think the most important help
of biotechnology is in the field of making medicines that helped save a million lives.

Submitted by:
JESSELA D. ESTRELLA
BS PSYCHOLOGY IV