Thursday, July 9, 2009

Biotechnology in food production


Biotechnology has invaded all fields, including the food production. It is applied in the latter in a way that it helps produce a strain in plants that has a specific desired trait(s). It can be the size of the plant, its resistance to pesticides and bacteria or the abundance of nutrients in it, you name it it can be done! This can help increase the crop yield as well as be beneficial for us as some nutrition additives can be incorporated into the produced plants. The option, again, are infinite. However this technique has been applied for centuries, it includes using a certain strain over the other and replanting it because it has randomly acquired a mutation that gives it a desired trait. This can be done now in more sophisticated manner and the mutations can be chosen, no need to wait for them to happen naturally.
A debate has been going on about the agricultural biotechnology which includes, what is its effect on us humans on the long run? How ethical is it? People and scientists take sides on that and it is not possible to find an answer to either question at this point in time.

IFIC. (2006). Retrieved on July 9 from http://www.ific.org/food/biotechnology/index.cfm.

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