Biotechnology is a technology that applies the basic principles of biology, chemistry and engineering to produce useful substances or provide certain services for human beings by using organisms (including microorganisms, animal cells and plant cells) or their components (organelles and enzymes).
In recent years, with the rapid development of modern biotechnology, including the achievements of genetic engineering, cell engineering, protein engineering, enzyme engineering and biochemical engineering, people pay more and more attention to using the characteristics of biotransformation to produce chemical products, especially new products that are difficult to obtain by general chemical means, and change the existing technology to solve the two thorny problems of energy crisis and environmental pollution that have been puzzling for a long time, and some of them have been put into practice.
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For thousands of years, human beings have adopted biotechnology in agriculture, food industry and medicine. Early biotechnology can be traced back to ancient times. The ancient Egyptians used yeast to make wine.
Later, it includes the traditional use of microbial fermentation technology for food fermentation, or fermentation to produce antibiotics. Are examples of using biotechnology. Modern biotechnology, since the discovery of DNA structure in 1950, molecular biology has developed rapidly, which has revolutionized traditional biotechnology. For example, using gene cloning technology, insulin is cloned into Escherichia coli for production. Opened the industrial value of modern biotechnology. At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 20th century, biotechnology has expanded to include new and different disciplines, such as genomics, gene recombination technology, applied immunology and the development of medical and diagnostic tests.
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