what are the methods used in biotechnology?tnx..?

Answer 1

Hi. I am a scientist who works in the pharmaceutical/biotech industry. In my field, we do a wide variety of things:

In terms of cell-based drug discovery assays, we can take cells from a person, grow them in petri dishes and test new drugs that we've developed on them to see if the cells live or die in response to the drug. (Of course, this is in very VERY general terms; it's much more complicated than that). If we want to test a variety of cell types against a variety of chemical compounds, we can use automated technology called High Throughput Screening... In HTS, very sophotisticated robots carry out 96 or 384 experiments at a time.

Molecular biologists can change cells by adding viruses or DNA plasmids and allowing the virus or plasmid to assimilate itself into the host cells's normal DNA. This process is called transfection. This is useful if you want to overexpress a gene or condition that you want to study or model/test a drug against. Molecular biologists can also clone these plasmids and grow more of them for large-scale experiments. Two other common techniques that molecular biologists use are PCR (in which we can look at an organism's genes) and Western Blots (that allows us to look at certain proteins that are produced / expressed within cells).

Histologists can take tissues and use immunohistochemistry (IHC) to detect the presence of certain proteins or other characteristics of the cells. In IHC, antibodies which targe a certain cellular protein are applied to a preserved tissue and that antibody can then be detected by fluorescence or an enzyme-based coloration process.

These are just a few of the techniques that we use to develop new drug therapeutics. Be aware that the process to develop one drug from start to finish takes about 15-20 years and about $1billion, which might give you an idea of exactly how complicated it can get once you get into detail on the topic.

Answer 2

well..they go in for genetic engg.its a science where they cut out the segments of dna from a foreign organism and incorporate it in the desired organism so as to get the required characteristics.

Answer 3

Go here to learn more about it: