Biotechnology - technology of the future

The appearance of products containing toxic chemicals in life is one of the reasons that make the environment increasingly polluted, human health is threatened. In that context, biotechnology (CNSH) was born as a perfect solution for humans in solving environmental problems, protecting health and contributing to bringing a safe life to people.

Biotechnology is an industry built on the system of living organisms or living organizations to produce and create technological products based on biology, especially widely applied in agriculture, food science, and pharmaceuticals, serving the needs and lives of people while developing the economy - society with environmentally friendly products.

The term biotechnology was coined by Karlerky in 1917, based on the foundation of life science with the combination of research processes and technical equipment to create technological scales to exploit the life activities of microorganisms, plant and animal cells to produce high-quality biological products on an industrial scale.

Biotechnology participates in many fields such as: bioinformatics - a multidisciplinary field that solves biological problems by using computational techniques; blue biotechnology - applied in maritime and fisheries; green biotechnology - applied in agriculture; red biotechnology - applied in medicine and pharmacy; and white biotechnology - applied in industry. Biotechnology has achieved great achievements and has strong development prospects in the coming years thanks to the comprehensive inheritance of achievements from basic sciences such as microbiology, genetics, biochemistry, physiology, molecular biology, immunology, applied microbiology, biochemical technology, etc.

Biotechnology is developing on the basis of new techniques: genetics; cell fusion; bioreactions (including fermentation techniques, enzyme techniques, bioreactors); tissue culture; cell culture; embryotransplan-tation; nucleartransplan-tation... preparing for a biological revolution in economic and technical sectors.

Nowadays, in agriculture, with the advancement of tissue culture techniques, people can produce varieties in the laboratory to produce much faster than the classical method, increasing productivity by 2,500 times. Tissue culture techniques also allow for a long process to obtain products with the same perfect genetics as well as to create new lines.

Molecular biology techniques have a wide range of applications, allowing the detection of toxic substances in the production process, in food or in the ecosystem. Molecular biology techniques also help in the selection at a very early stage from embryos or young shoots of individuals with beneficial characteristics such as gender, disease resistance, and resistance under special conditions.

With molecular biology techniques, people have produced monoclinaux antibodies that have a very diverse effect in diagnosis. Particularly prominent applications of molecular biology are carried out in the field of diagnosis (plant and animal diseases) and in breeding.

To date, the main revolution in biotechnology has been genetic engineering (or recombinant genetic engineering). Now, one can introduce a foreign gene into any part of the body, just by checking the "agreement" of the cell receiving the new gene. This success is of particular significance because it allows the separation of complex biological processes into simple parts, from which it is easy to determine the task and mode of activity of each gene, allowing to determine the correlation between the structure and the task of the molecules.

Thanks to genetic engineering, humans can design and manufacture microorganisms and cells that have never existed before. These artificial microorganisms can synthesize on an industrial scale valuable products that effectively serve to protect human health and improve the quality of life.

In terms of cultivation, transferring a foreign bacterial gene (such as a gene for herbicide resistance, insect resistance, disease resistance, etc.) into a plant cell will give the plant special qualities.

Recently, the US has created a type of corn that is resistant to pests because each cell of this corn carries the gene that produces insect-killing crystals from the insect-killing bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis.

The creation of the potato plant by fusing potato cells with tomato cells is a unique achievement. The potato plant grows potato tubers from underground roots and produces tomato fruits on the plant. To date, nearly 20 crops have been genetically modified, of which 20 more have achieved the benefits desired by breeders and are in production.

Regarding livestock, there have been more than 10 species including cows, pigs, goats, sheep, rabbits, chickens, fish... that have been focused on research. The research direction aims to create breeds of livestock and pets that are resistant to diseases, with the ability to significantly improve the quality of meat, milk and eggs.

With the techniques of gene transplantation, zygote transplantation, and cell culture, the selective breeding of cattle has achieved a very important step forward. From a selected good breed cow, artificial insemination with another good breed will create a hybrid zygote with the necessary selective characteristics, this zygote can be easily extracted and transported from one country to another to be implanted into the uterus of local cows, making them pregnant to give birth to calves with the selected superior characteristics.

Furthermore, it is possible to create many embryos by separating individual cells as the zygote begins to divide. These embryos are examined for chromosomes (to retain only those that produce female calves), and cryopreserved for long-term storage so that they can be transported anywhere in the world.

Genetic engineering also allows breeders to remove the nucleus from a fertilized egg of a normal cow and replace it with the nucleus of a cell from a cow with selected good characteristics, creating a fertilized egg with a new nucleus, then reinserting this egg into the uterus of a normal cow to allow it to become pregnant and give birth to a calf with the desired characteristics.

In a summary list of 2017, ResearchGate - the largest social network for scientists in the world - has listed the five most interesting trends in biotechnology: bioelectricity - helping cells have more innate immune responses, fighting infections and injuries; regenerative medicine - using stem cell therapies, tissue engineering and artificial organs to restore, repair or replace damaged organs or tissues; cancer immunotherapy - helping the human immune system recognize and destroy cancer cells; CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing - mimicking the way bacteria protect themselves from viruses; single-cell RNA sequencing to find many new, previously unknown cell types. There is reason to hope that biotechnology will achieve new successes that effectively serve human interests./.