Unit 7: Biotechnology

 Biotechnology is the use of microorganisms to make things that people want, often involving
industrial production.

 Biotechnology contributes much towards the growing public and global health needs.
 It has revolutionized mankind since its existence.
 It provides effective diagnostics, prevention and treatment measures including production of
novel drugs and recombinant vaccines.
 It gives effective drug delivery approaches, new methods for therapeutics, nutritionally
enriched genetically modified crops and efficient methods for environmental cleanup.
 Accordingly, life quality and expectancy have been increased worldwide through the services
provided by biotechnology.

 It involves ways of making and preserving foods and making alcoholic drinks.
 Traditional applications of biotechnology involve brewing beers, making wines, making bread, and
making cheese and yoghurt.
 Modern applications of biotechnology include using genetic engineering to change crops and
animals; producing new medicines; and helping to provide new energy sources.
 It has enormous significance in helping people to improve and control their lives.
 Biotechnology is based on microbiology - the study of microorganisms which are tiny living
organisms including bacteria, viruses, fungi and protoctista.
 Bacteria are used in the manufacture of irgo (yoghurt) and Ayib (cheese).
 Yeast is used to make many traditional Ethiopian fermented foods, including injera, and also to
Traditional biotechnology
 It is the traditional techniques of using living organisms to yield new
products or modify foods or other useful products.
 One of the most useful microorganisms is yeast.
 The yeasts are single-celled organisms. Each yeast cell has a nucleus,
cytoplasm and a membrane surrounded by a cell wall.
 The main way in which yeasts reproduce is by asexual budding –
splitting into two, to form new yeast cells.
 Just one gram of yeast contains about 25 billion cells!
 When yeasts have plenty of oxygen, they respire aerobically (with
oxygen), breaking down sugar to provide energy for the cells, and
producing water and carbon dioxide as waste products.
 they can also respire anaerobically (without oxygen).
 When yeast cells break down sugar in the absence of oxygen, they
produce ethanol (commonly referred to as alcohol) and carbon
dioxide.
 Aerobic respiration provides more energy than anaerobic respiration, allowing
yeast cells to grow and reproduce.
 However, once they exist in large numbers, yeast cells can survive for a long time
in low-oxygen conditions, and will break down all the available sugar to produce
ethanol.
 The anaerobic respiration of yeast is sometimes referred to as fermentation.
 In Ethiopia yeast (known locally as ershoo) has been used to make injera (bread)
possibly since even earlier times.
 Injera needs yeast
 Natural yeasts start to grow and respire in the dough.
 At first the yeast respires aerobically, although this may change to anaerobic
respiration.
 The yeast produces carbon dioxide, making the mix rise a little and giving it a
tangy flavor.
 When you cook the mixture, the bubbles of gas expand in the high temperature,
giving injera its typical texture, which is so good for soaking up the food.
 The yeasts are killed during the cooking process.
Making alcoholic drinks
 When fruits fall to the ground and begin to decay, wild yeasts on their skin break
down the fruit sugar to form ethanol and carbon dioxide.
 We now use this same reaction in a controlled way to make drinks such as beer, tej
and wine.
 In both cases the yeast has to be supplied with carbohydrates to act as an energy
source for respiration.
When you make tej, you need honey, water and gesho leaf or stick. Gesho gives a
bitter edge to the brew, and wild yeasts found on the plant start the fermentation
going. The yeasts use the honey as a source of food.
 As the yeast colonies grow, they start to respire anaerobically, and this produces
ethanol and carbon dioxide.
 The alcohol content of tej varies from about 6 to 11%.
Tej and tella are the most commonly consumed alcoholic drinks in Ethiopia.
winemaking uses natural sugar, found in fruit such as grapes, as the energy source
for the yeast.
Once the fruit is pressed, it is mixed with yeast and water.
Then let the yeast respire anaerobically until most of the sugar has been used up. At
this stage, you filter the wine to remove the yeast and put it in bottles, where it will
 Most commercially sold wine is made from grapes, but wine can be made
from almost any fruit or vegetable
 alcohol in large amounts is poisonous to yeast as well as to people.
 This is why the alcohol content of wine is rarely more than 14% – once it gets much
higher, it kills all the yeast and stops the fermentation.
Food production using bacteria
 People have used milk from many different types of animals.
 However, there is one big drawback in using milk as part of the diet.
 It very rapidly goes off, smelling and tasting disgusting!
 There are so many fermented food products made in Ethiopia including:
Making yoghurt (irgo)
 Traditionally, yoghurt is fermented whole milk. Yoghurt is formed by the action of bacteria
on the lactose (milk sugar) in the milk.
 To make yoghurt, you add a starter culture of the right kind of bacteria to warm milk.
 Often this starter culture is just a small amount of yoghurt you have already made.
 The mixture needs to be warm so the bacteria begin to grow, reproduce and ferment.
 As the bacteria break down the lactose in the milk, they produce lactic acid, which gives the
yoghurt its sharp, tangy taste.
 This is known as lactic fermentation.
 The lactic acid produced by the bacteria causes the milk to clot and solidify into yoghurt.
 The action of the bacteria also gives the yoghurt a smooth, thick texture.
 Once the yoghurt forming bacteria have worked on the milk, they also help prevent
the growth of other bacteria that normally send the milk bad.
 Yoghurt, if it is kept cool, will last almost three weeks before it goes bad.
 Once you have made your basic yoghurt, you can mix in flavorings, spices and fruit.
 In Ethiopia, olive tree used as gourd giving the yoghurt a pleasant flavor, this
disinfects the vessel so that only good bacteria grow in the milk.
Cheese making
 Cheese making depends on the reactions of bacteria with milk changing the texture
and taste, and also preserving the milk. Cheese making is very successful in
preserving milk, and some cheeses can survive for years without decay.
 Around 900 different types of cheese are made around the world, but the basis of
the production method is the same for them all.
 Just as in yoghurt making, you add a starter culture of bacteria to warm milk. The
difference is in the type of bacteria added.
 The bacteria in cheese making also convert lactose to lactic acid, but they make
much more lactic acid.
 As a result, the solid part (curds) is much more solid than in yoghurt.
 Enzymes are also added to increase the separation of the milk.-- -these often come
from the stomachs of calves or other young animals.
 When it has completely curdled, you can separate the curds from the liquid whey
(known as aguat here in Ethiopia).
 Then you can use the curds for cheese making.
 The whey is often used in other dishes.
 The curds can be used fresh, and can be seasoned or flavored. This is the basis of
ayib.
• Here in Ethiopia cheese is traditionally made by first making yoghurt from fresh
milk, extracting the butter by continuous agitation, and finally boiling the remaining
part to make the cheese.
 New applications of biotechnology
 Modern or new biotechnology involves the manipulation (modification) of the
genetic materials of living organisms to produce the desired products at industrial
scale in fermenters.
 They react to changes, keeping the conditions as stable as possible. This, in turn,
means we can obtain the maximum yield.
 Industrial fermenters usually have:
1. an oxygen supplies = to provide oxygen for respiration by the microorganisms
2. a stirrer = to keep the micro-organisms in suspension, maintain an even
temperature, and make sure oxygen and food are distributed evenly through the
culture
3. a water-cooled jacket = to remove the excess heat produced by the respiring
microorganisms – any rise in temperature is used to heat the water, which is
constantly removed and replaced with more cold water
4. measuring instruments = for continuous monitoring of factors such as pH and
temperature so that adjustments can be made if necessary
 Genetic engineering involves changing the genetic material of an
organism.
 Genetic material carries the instructions for a new organism, found in
the nucleus of every cell.
 You take a small piece of information – a gene – from one organism
and transfer it to the genetic material of a completely different
organism.
 So, for example, a gene from one of your human cells can be ‘cut out’
using enzymes, and transferred to the cell of a bacterium.
 Your gene carries on making a human protein, even though it is now
in a bacterium.
 There is a limit to the types of protein that bacteria are capable of
making.
 As the animal or plant grows, it develops with the new, desired
characteristics from the other organism.
 Agricultural biotechnology
 selective breeding is used to change livestock and crops to get big grains, resistance
to disease or plenty of milk, and breed from them.
o selective breeding takes time, and there are limitations to it.
o By using genetic engineering, we can introduce new characteristics very rapidly.
o Engineered genes can be used to improve the growth rates of plants and animals.
o used to make crop plants that are resistant to drought and to disease, and to produce
plants that make their own pesticide chemicals.
 The Ethiopian Agricultural Research Institute is using modern biotechnology
to improve teff, coffee, fruit plants and some of our forest trees for commercial
cultivation.
 However, there are some possible problems with the new biotechnologies, so we
must be careful.
 Insects may become pesticide-resistant if they eat a constant diet of pesticide-
forming plants.
 Genes from genetically modified plants and animals might spread into the wildlife
of the countryside, which could make difficulties.
 Genetically modified crops are often not fertile, which means farmers have to buy
new seed each year.
• Animals that have had their DNA manipulated to possess and express an extra
(foreign) gene are known as transgenic animals.
• Transgenic rats, rabbits, pigs, sheep, cows and fish have been produced, although
over 95 per cent of all existing transgenic animals are mice.
Medical biotechnology
 It is the use of living cells and cell materials to research and produce
pharmaceutical and diagnostic products that help treat and prevent human diseases.
• Biotechnology is extremely important in modern medicine.
• It is used to develop vaccines and to create new medicines.
• The first medicine that really relied on microbiology was penicillin which makes
life easier.
• This antibiotic is one of the best-known medicines in the world, and has
revolutionized medicine in the time since it was first manufactured.
 When genetically engineered bacteria are cultured on a large scale, they can make
huge quantities of protein.
 This helps to make a number of drugs and hormones used as medicines.
 For example, people with diabetes need supplies of the hormone insulin.
 It used to be extracted from the pancreas of pigs and cattle, but it wasn’t quite the
same as human insulin, and the supply was quite variable.
 Both problems have now been solved by the introduction of genetically
engineered bacteria that can make human insulin.
 Biotechnology also makes it possible to develop vaccines more easily.
 A number of sheep and other mammals have been engineered to produce life-
saving human proteins in their milk. For example, genetically modified sheep can
make special blood-clotting
• These can be used for people with hemophilia, so they are no longer at risk from
receiving contaminated blood.
• It is applied to manufacture pharmaceuticals like enzymes, antibiotics and vaccines,
and its use for molecular diagnostic.
• Genome research and proteome research are among the most important plate form
technologies of biotechnology.
• The recombinant DNA technological processes have made immense impact in the
area of healthcare by enabling mass production of safe and more effective
 Genetically Engineered Insulin
 Management of adult-onset diabetes is possible by taking insulin at regular time
intervals. Insulin used for diabetes was earlier extracted from pancreas of
slaughtered cattle and pigs.
 Insulin from an animal source, though caused some patients to develop allergy or
other types of reactions to the foreign protein.
 You can easily grow a large quantity of the bacteria and make as much insulin as
you need.
Gene Therapy
• Gene therapy is a collection of methods that allows correction of a gene defect that
has been diagnosed in a child/embryo.
• Here genes are inserted into a person’s cells and tissues to treat a disease.
• Correction of a genetic defect involves delivery of a normal gene into the
individual or embryo to take over the function of and compensate for the non-fg
Molecular Diagnosis
• You know that for effective treatment of a disease, early diagnosis and
understanding its pathophysiology is very important.
• very low concentration of a bacteria or virus (at a time when the symptoms of the
disease are not yet visible) can be detected by amplification of their nucleic acid by
PCR.
Applications of biology in food (Industry)
• Industrial biotechnology is biotechnology applied to industrial and other
production processes.
• .
• One of the biggest changes is that enzymes are produced by genetically engineered
bacteria, and the enzymes are then used in the production of processed foods and
drinks.
• Enzymes are used to clarify beer. They are used to break down starch and convert
the sugars into glucose syrup.
• They are used to make meat more tender, and to break down the food used to make
commercial baby food.
• It has even been used to create a completely new food based on fungi, known as
mycoprotein, which means ‘protein from fungus’.
• It is produced using the fungus Fusarium, which grows and reproduces rapidly
• It needs aerobic conditions to grow successfully, and can then double its mass every
five hours or so.
• The fungal biomass is harvested and purified. Then it is dried and processed to
make mycoprotein, a pale yellow solid with a faint taste of mushrooms.
Applications of biology in energy production
• Everyone needs fuel of some sort to provide them with energy.
• However, there is only a limited amount of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas for
us to use.
• Even wood and peat are becoming scarce.
• So, other renewable forms of fuel are needed.
• The generation of biogas from human and animal waste is becoming increasingly
important in both the developing and the developed world.
 What is biogas?
• Biogas is a flammable mixture of gases, formed when bacteria break down
plant material, or the waste products of animals, in anaerobic conditions.
• It is mainly methane, but the composition of the mixture varies depending
on what is put into the generator and which bacteria are present.
• Biogas is produced from dung or plant material, which contains a high
level of carbohydrates.
 This is added into a biogas generator or digester.
• Then you add a mixed population of many different types of bacteria
which are needed to digest the carbohydrate.
• The bacteria you use are similar to those in the stomachs of ruminants such
as cows or sheep.
• Some of the bacteria break down the cellulose in plant cell walls. Others
break down the sugars formed, to produce methane and other gases.
• The biogas produced is passed along a pipe into your home, where you
burn it to produce heat, light or refrigeration.
• The bacteria involved in biogas production work best at a temperature of
around 30 °C, so biogas generators tend to work best in hot countries.
 More biofuels
• In countries such as Ethiopia, plants grow quickly. Sugar cane grows about 4–5
meters in a year, and has a juice which is very high in carbohydrates,
particularly sucrose. Maize and sweet potatoes also grow fast. We can break
down the starch in maize kernels or potato tubers into glucose, using the
enzyme carbohydrase. We can convert the carbohydrates we grow into clean
and efficient fuels.
• Ethanol-based fuels
• If sugar-rich products from cane and maize are fermented anaerobically with
yeast, the sugars are broken down incompletely to give ethanol and water. You
can extract the ethanol from the products of fermentation by distillation, and
you can then use it in cars and other vehicles as a fuel.
• Car engines need special modification to be able to use pure ethanol as a fuel,
but it is not a major job. Many cars can run on a mixture of petrol and ethanol
without any problems at all.
• The biggest difficulty with using plant-based fuels
for our cars is that it takes a lot of plant material to
produce the ethanol. As a result, the use of ethanol
as a fuel has largely been limited to countries with
enough space, and a suitable climate, to grow a lot
of plant material as quickly as possible. Here in
Ethiopia, we have that capability.
Advantages and disadvantages of ethanol as a fuel
• In many ways, ethanol is an ideal fuel. It is efficient, and it does
not produce toxic gases when you burn it.
• It is much less polluting than conventional fuels, which produce
carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides.
• In addition, you can mix ethanol with conventional petrol to
make a fuel known as gasohol.
 This is increasingly being done, and reduces pollution levels
considerably, although there is still some pollution from the
petrol part of the mix.
 Using ethanol as a fuel is a carbon-neutral activity. This means
there is no overall increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
when you burn ethanol.
• The original plants removed carbon dioxide from the air during
photosynthesis. When you burn the ethanol, you simply return it.
•