Lesson 1 of 11 · 6 min

What biotechnology is

NCERT §9 (chapter introduction)

Day one of Kavya's summer internship at a biotech lab in Hyderabad. At the door, the supervisor asks her to define the word on the building's signboard. Kavya hesitates.

The story this chapter follows: Kavya's summer in a biotech lab

Kavya, a Class 12 student in Hyderabad, spends her summer as an intern in a biotechnology lab. Each part of this chapter is one stop on her weeks there: learning the word, cutting DNA with EcoRI, running gels, reading the pBR322 map, heat-shocking bacteria, spooling DNA, running PCR, picking colonies, and finally visiting the pilot plant's bioreactor.

The lesson in notes

In short

Biotechnology covers techniques that use living organisms, or enzymes taken from them, to make products and run processes useful to people.

In that broad sense, curd, bread and wine, all made with microbes, are biotechnology too.

Today the word is used more narrowly for processes that use genetically modified organisms to do such things on a larger scale.

Other techniques also count: IVF that produces a 'test-tube' baby, making a gene synthetically and putting it to use, building a DNA vaccine, and repairing a faulty gene.

The European Federation of Biotechnology (EFB) gives a definition that covers both the traditional and the modern molecular kind: natural science brought together with organisms, cells, their parts and molecular analogues to yield products and services.