It will be able to create new markets and offer businesses a way to reduce costs while protecting the environment. Review times are quicker than with new drugs which means that advancements and the benefits seen in industrial biotechnology can occur in as little as two years from lab study to commercial application.

Biotechnology helps in industry not only by transforming how we are able to manufacture products but it is also able to provide us with new products that we at one time would never have thought possible. How wide a scope of benefits industrial biotechnology has to offer is still not known as the technology is still relatively new but from its very beginning it has integrated product improvements with the prevention of pollution.

Nothing speaks more highly for the benefits that industrial biotechnology has given us than the phosphate water pollution problems that occurred during the 1970`s, which was caused by the use of phosphates in laundry detergents. Biotechnology gave us enzymes which were able to give us the same effect on laundry and in fact were able to remove stains better than phosphates ever could while giving us a non polluting bi based product. This not only benefited the homemaker but also dramatically reduced the phosphate related algal blooms in waters around the world.

A form of industrial biotechnology has been dated as far back as 6000 BC when people fermented grapes to make wine and yeast was used to make beer, knowledge of this increased over the years with the production of cheeses, yogurts, vinegar and other food products.

Then there was a breakthrough in 1928 when Sir Alexander Fleming extracted the drug Penicillin from mould, biotechnology was able to ensure large-scale fermentation techniques of this wonder drug and it was developed to make industrial quantities.

However, it wasn’t until after World War II that the industrial biotechnology revolution began and gave us the industrial biotechnology techniques that we recognise today. Over the last few years, industrial biotechnology has come a long way and has been able to produce enzymes that makes daily life easier and better for all of us and also for the manufacturing sector.

Simple examples of this are the enzyme which is now used to tenderise meat and contact lens fluids that contain enzymes to remove sticky protein deposits more easily. These of course are industrial biotechnology in its simplest form but show that industrial biotechnology involves the use of microbial production of enzymes which are specialised proteins; it is these enzymes which make industrial biotechnology such a powerful new area of technology for the future.

With the population expected to reach over 10 billion by the year 2030 it is estimated that the world food production will have to double on the farmland that exists today, if it is to compete with the anticipated growth in the population. The ever-increasing needs of yields of crops and the decreasing crop inputs such as water and fertiliser can all be helped by biotechnology as can advancements in providing pest control that is better for our environment.

Crop biotechnology

Horticulturists and farmers have always relied for centuries on cross breeding and hybridizing plants and making genetic modifications to them in order to make improvements in the output and quality of food and fibre crops. They have made great advancements in building in protection against pests and diseases and protection from the harsher elements.

We learned from the Stone Age farmers to make a selection for next years crops from those plants that were strongest and healthiest and to save seed from these with which to replant. By selectively sowing seeds the earliest agriculturists performed modifications genetically to turn plants growing in the wild into domesticated crops, a long time before the science of genetics was really understood.

Over the years, knowledge and understanding of plant genetics improved and we gradually began to purposefully cross breed plants with the traits we wanted in order to produce plants which had the benefits of both parents, leaving undesirable traits behind. Virtually every plant that is grown for food today has come from cross breeding or hybridization or a combination of both.

Although we have come a long way in such a short time the process we were using to produce these crops was time consuming, costly and inefficient. Here is where the tools of biotechnology come into play, biotechnology allows us to take single genes from plants that give us the desired traits and move them freely from one plant to another.

This is a far more precise process than what we used to use and eliminates the thousands of genes of unknown function which was transferred along with the good traits into our crops. Biotechnology can also help us to remove the technical obstacles when moving genetic traits between plants and opens up a whole new world in benefiting food production.

How biotechnology can improve crop production

Agricultural scientists are incorporating biotechnology into crop production and protection, using the same traits that have been used throughout the decades and incorporate cross breeding and genetic modifications. Techniques are being used to increase the size of the yield of the crops, make crops resistant to disease caused by bacteria, fungi and viruses and give them the ability to better withstand harsher elements.

Biotechnology has also given us a better understanding of how we can make better use of the plants built in defence systems and it has opened up new avenues allowing us to work with nature by providing us with new bio pesticides.

These new pesticides allow us target crop pests but do not harm humans, animals, birds, fish and insects; they are also beneficial as they can control pests which have become resistant to the more conventional pesticides.