Biotechnological Applications

Biotechnology has applications across a range of major industrial areas, including crop production / agriculture, the non-food uses of crops such as biodegradable plastics, biofuels and vegetable oil), health / medical care and environmental uses. Other uses for biotechnology is recycling and treating waste, bioremediation or the cleaning up sites that are contaminated by industrial activities, and in the production of biological weapons.

There are several divisions of biotechnology that this science has spawned.

* Bioinformatics uses computational techniques to address biological problems. This is is sometimes referred to as computational biology. Best way to describe it is by defining it as conceptualizing biology in terms of molecules, then applying informatics techniques to organize the information on a large scale. Bioinformatics plays an important role in the pharmaceutical sector.

* Blue biotechnology comprises the marine / aquatic applications of biotechnology.

* Green biotechnology is biotechnology as it applies to agricultural processes. The designing of transgenic plants (those that can grow under specific environments in the presence (such as plants that are already cultivated with pesticides, eliminating the need for external application of said pesticides*) – or lack thereof – of chemicals falls under this category.

* Red biotechnology is applied to medical processes, such as the engineering of organisms to produce antibiotics.

* White biotechnology applies to industrial processes, such as in the engineering of an organism to produce a useful chemical.

Biotechnology is so important in our current and future states that the economic output and inflow of all branches of biotechnology gets its own term: bioeconomy.

* Whether cultivating plants with ingrown pesticides is environmentally-friendlier than the actual process of external application (spraying) of pesticides is an area of much debate and controversy. Until enough test subjects ingest the fruits of the labor plants in order to test the theory, we won’t know. Until then, it’s a gamble – but what isn’t? How about playing slots for money at US player friendly casinos, if you pick the right ones?