Genetic Engineering : A Solution or a Problem
dr-irfan-khan
People are living on the earth for millions of years and depending upon natural resources for their life. The most essential elements for life are food and water. With these, the existence of life on earth is impossible as in the case of other planets. Humans, with the grace of Almighty GOD, always put their effort to improve things so that they could create better facilities for life such as making homes with bamboo, making clothes with cotton, making pots with brass and copper, etc.
Humans, from time to time revise things as per their needs. It’s a most vocal saying that “Need is the mother of all inventions”. Whenever, it needs, human beings find a way of their choice by putting effort continuously.
Genetic engineering is also playing similar to finding out the solutions to all the existing problems that humans were facing and not getting any solution. Ultimately, genetic engineering gave them a solution such as the production of insulin at the commercial level is only possible by genetic engineering.
To enhance the production of ascorbic acid and other microbially generated molecules by genetic engineering.
Genetic engineering is actually a tool of biotechnology, which is applicable in agriculture, food, animals, plants, etc., to improve their production and quality by some transformation in genetic makeup.
In the near past, BT cotton and BT brinjal varieties were made with the help of genetic engineering by transferring a gene from a bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis to the plant genome. Actually, these are made to provide the solution to Bollworm that causes damage to flowers or fruit at an early stage by boring them.
Lots of other products are also made with the help of genetic engineering.
There is no single technology on earth that does not have any limitations so as genetic engineering.
Currently, scientists are employing the latest technology Crisper/cas to edit the genome. This is the same technology that bacteria use as ab immune defense.
When bacteria become infected with viruses, the viruses’ DNA fragments are picked up by the bacteria and inserted into their own DNA in a specific manner to form segments known as CRISPR arrays.
Here are a few examples of genetic engineering-based products below in the table.
|
S.No. |
Genetically |
Organism |
Genetic change |
|
1 |
Virus |
Plum |
Resistance |
|
2 |
Changes |
Canola |
Achieved |
|
3 |
Herbicide |
Soybean |
Glyphosate herbicide (Roundup) tolerance |
|
4 |
Fortification |
Rice |
Insertion |
|
5 |
Oral |
Maize |
Transferring |
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