If any of you have been reading recent volumes
of the National Geographic, Times or Newsweek ,you may have felt that these are exciting
times for Biotechnology. And I am not just talking about scientists. Many businessmen even
in Asia have a lot of reasons to feel energized at the opportunities lying ahead .Visions
for the future according to Asia week suggests that dawn is just breaking on the
bio-economy era. That health care may likely take the form of genetic interventions to
prevent problems ,vaccines will come in the shape of fruit and spare body parts could be
grown from stem cells. Many Asian country companies, including those in Japan, Singapore,
Taiwan, Koreas and India have already started investing in Gene study or genomics of Asian
populations so that they can design better drugs and offer customized treatments for many
diseases. Some are developing important partnerships with US companies .Some are thinking
of marrying the new technologies (the avalanche of sequence information from
disease-causing bacteria to the first draft of the human genome and of a higher plant)
with traditional knowledge. Knowledge of herbal medicines is one strengthen that Asia
could build upon; Agra-biotechnology is another .China leads the latter field since it is
driven by internal needs. Recent news has indicated that pest resistant genetically
modified rice is performing much better that control varieties.
Among recent advances that are revolutionizing both medical and agricultural biotechnology
,mention has to be made of "BIOCHIPS". These are also called gene chips, DNA
chips or microarrays. These are glass or silicon-based minute chips on which DNA from
specific organisms can be permanently embedded and analyzed repeatedly using fluorescent
DNA or RNA tags. The tags are monitored by scanning with lasers and computers. The latter
may already contain data on a lot of sequence information, which allows one to analyze the
new data obtained from the laser scan. the new data for instance ,can point to genetic
variations such as susceptibility to certain diseases or drugs. The data can also indicate
genes affected under stresses like salinity or drought thus helping scientists to search
for target genes, which could help fight such stress in crop plants.
Some prospects for agricultural biotechnology in developing
countries
As a developing country with poor infrastructure, even we can think of some
biotechnological advances which could help improve our economy which is mainly based on
agriculture:
Back to top
Application of tissue culture for mass propagation and disease
elimination in various crops of interest in various crops of interest in the country
It is possible to multiply a single plant into thousands in short time through tissue
culture techniques. This has great potential in reforestation of our ever-decreasing
forest reserves and also in propagation of cut flower. Multiplication in a specialized way
through tissue culture can also eliminate viruses. The latter is of major importance for
crops like potato, where it is not possible to obtain uninfected propagules for
plantation.
Introduction of useful genes into plants such as those for pest
and disease resistance or improved nutritional from diverse sources
Traditional or pre-biotechnological era efforts at production of improved crops for say
disease of improved crops for say disease resistance were dependent on crossing of the
commercial crop with a closely related wild cultivars having the desired resistance .The
crossing step would then be followed by back-crossing and selection steps to eliminate the
undesirable characteristics of the wild cultivar. The latter could take from 5-7 years.
With the advent of biotechnological advances such as genetic engineering, useful genes
from diverse sources such as bacteria or totally unrelated plant species can be isolated
and the specific gene inserted to the crop being improved by transformation. For example,
rice ,which lacks vitamin A, has now been modified with genes form daffodil and a bacteria
so that it can produce its own carotene (vitamin A) Rice could never have been crossed
|
