Animal Biotechnology

Biotechnology is a buzzword in today's world when everyone wants to use biotechnology for betterment in their sphere of active. The governments of developed and developing countries are committing substrial funds for research in biotechnology. Even though man has exploited biotechnological methods for thousands of years in brewing, wine making, bread making and food preservation, its industrial application in large scale for development of better products are gaining momentum only recently.

It is also defined as “the application of scientific and engineering principles to the processing of materials by biological agents to produce goods and services” (Coleman, 1986). In this, the word “agent” denotes a wide range of biological things such as enzymes, whole cells or multicellular organisms. Services and goods mean such processes as waste-water treatment. The scientific and engineering principles are chiefly microbiology, biochemistry, genetics, biochemical and chemical engineering.

Biotechnology is the integrated use of biochemistry, microbiology and engineering sciences in order to achieve technological (industrial) application capabilities of microorganisms, cultured tissues, cells and parts thereof. The extraordinary multidisciplinary nature of biotechnology is shown by an anecdote, that the fruits of biotechnology are born on a tree whose roots are the biological sciences, in particular microbiology, genetics, molecular biology and biochemistry, whose trunk is chemical engineering in its widest sense. A key factor in the distinction between biology and biotechnology is their scale of operation. The biologist usually works in the range of nanograms to milligrams. Biotechnologies working on the production of vaccines may be satisfied with milligram yields, but many other projects aim at kilogram or tonnes. Thus, one of the main aspects of biotechnology consists of scaling up of biological processes