What is the importance of Genetic Engineering?

Question

and what are the motives of genetic engineering?

Answer 1

It allows us to fix the mistakes that nature made as well as improve the life that we have access to.

Genetic engineering can also allow us to reduce the environmental impact of farming by making more food from less land and using less pesticides.

Answer 2

Importance Of Genetic Engineering

Answer 3

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Genetic Engineering is also called genetic modification It involves the introduction of foreign DNA or synthetic genes into the organism. The most common form of genetic engineering involves the insertion of new genetic material at an unspecified location in the host genome. This is accomplished by isolating and copying the genetic material of interest using molecular cloning methods to generate a DNA sequence containing the required genetic elements for expression, and then inserting this construct into the host organism. Other forms of genetic engineering include gene targeting and knocking out specific genes via engineered nucleases such as zinc finger nucleases or engineered homing endonucleases.

Answer 4

Recent efforts shows the importance of Genetic Engineeering
DOLLY - born by Recombinant DNA & Genetic Engineering

vegetables - Pomato Tomato + Potato in one plant
Beans + Ladies finger in one plant
this are all efforts of Re-combinent DNA totally called
Gentic Engineering...

Answer 5

The hope that one day people will be able to stop birth defects and give people rich fulfilling lives without having to suffer from illnesses that might be hereditary. I don't see the point in the view of messing with nature when so many people suffer from the imperfections of genetic faults. Why not make the human race perfect if you can? I suffer from illnesses which are hereditary and would give anything for the chance not to pass them to my children. Why should we all go through the same difficulties?

Answer 6

by genetic engineering we can develop our own genetic codes, create duplicates, eradicate genetic diseases and ya clones very intersting na

Answer 7

DEFINITION: Genetic Engineering is the scientific alteration of genes or genetic material to produce desireable new traits in organisms or to eliminate undesirable ones.

Genetic engineering, recombinant DNA technology, genetic modification/manipulation (GM) and gene splicing are terms that are applied to the manipulation of genes, generally implying that the process is outside the organism's natural reproductive process. It involves the isolation, manipulation and reintroduction of DNA into cells or model organisms, usually to express a protein to reach desired effects. The aim is to introduce new characteristics or attributes physiologically or physically, such as making a crop resistant to a herbicide, introducing a novel trait, enhancing existing ones, or producing a new protein or enzyme. Successful endeavours include the manufacture of human insulin through the use of modified bacteria, the manufacture of erythropoietin in Chinese hamster ovary cells, and the production of new types of experimental mice such as the OncoMouse (cancer mouse) for research.

Genetic engineering is a laboratory technique used by scientists to change the DNA of living organisms.
DNA is the blueprint for the individuality of an organism. The organism relies upon the information stored in its DNA for the management of every biochemical process. The life, growth and unique features of the organism depend on its DNA. The segments of DNA which have been associated with specific features or functions of an organism are called genes.

Molecular biologists have discovered many enzymes which change the structure of DNA in living organisms. Some of these enzymes can cut and join strands of DNA. Using such enzymes, scientists learned to cut specific genes from DNA and to build customized DNA using these genes. They also learned about vectors, strands of DNA such as viruses, which can infect a cell and insert themselves into its DNA.

With this knowledge, scientists started to build vectors which incorporated genes of their choosing and used the new vectors to insert these genes into the DNA of living organisms. Genetic engineers believe they can improve the foods we eat by doing this. For example, tomatoes are sensitive to frost. This shortens their growing season. Fish, on the other hand, survive in very cold water. Scientists identified a particular gene which enables a flounder to resist cold and used the technology of genetic engineering to insert this 'anti-freeze' gene into a tomato. This makes it possible to extend the growing season of the tomato.


During the latter stage stages of the 20th century, man harnessed the power of the atom, and not long after, soon realised the power of genes. Genetic engineering is going to become a very mainstream part of our lives sooner or later, because there are so many possibilities advantages (and disadvantages) involved. Here are just some of the advantages :

1. Disease could be prevented by detecting people/plants/animals that are genetically prone to certain hereditary diseases, and preparing for the inevitable. Also, infectious diseases can be treated by implanting genes that code for antiviral proteins specific to each antigen.

2. Animals and plants can be 'tailor made' to show desirable characteristics. Genes could also be manipulated in trees for example, to absorb more CO2 and reduce the threat of global warming.

3. Genetic Engineering could increase genetic diversity, and produce more variant alleles which could also be crossed over and implanted into other species. It is possible to alter the genetics of wheat plants to grow insulin for example.

Of course there are two sides to the coin, here are some possible eventualities and disadvantages.

1. Nature is an extremely complex inter-related chain consisting of many species linked in the food chain. Some scientists believe that introducing genetically modified genes may have an irreversible effect with consequences yet unknown.

2.Genetic engineering borderlines on many moral issues, particularly involving religion, which questions whether man has the right to manipulate the laws and course of nature.

3. Genetic engineering may be one of the greatest breakthroughs in recent history alongside the discovery of the atom and space flight, however, with the above eventualities and facts above in hand, governments have produced legislation to control what sort of experiments are done involving genetic engineering. In the UK there are strict laws prohibiting any experiments involving the cloning of humans. However, over the years here are some of the experimental 'breakthroughs' made possible by genetic engineering.

At the Roslin Institute in Scotland, scientists successfully cloned an exact copy of a sheep, named 'Dolly'. This was the first successful cloning of an animal, and most likely the first occurrence of two organisms being genetically identical. Note : Recently the sheep's health deteriorated detrimentally and it died.
Scientists successfully manipulated the genetic sequence of a rat to grow a human ear on its back. (Unusual, but for the purpose of reproducing human organs for medical purposes)
Most controversially, and maybe due to more liberal laws, an American scientist is currently conducting tests to clone himself.
Genetic engineering has been impossible until recent times due to the complex and microscopic nature of DNA and its component nucleotides. Through progressive studies, more and more in this area is being made possible, with the above examples only showing some of the potential that genetic engineering shows.

For us to understand chromosomes and DNA more clearly, they can be mapped for future reference. More simplistic organisms such as fruit fly (Drosophila) have been chromosome mapped due to their simplistic nature meaning they will require less genes to operate. At present, a task named the Human Genome Project is mapping the human genome, and should be completed in the next ten years.

The process of genetic engineering involves splicing an area of a chromosome, a gene, that controls a certain characteristic of the body. The enzyme endonuclease is used to split a DNA sequence and split the gene from the rest of the chromosome. For example, this gene may be programmed to produce an antiviral protein. This gene is removed and can be placed into another organism. For example, it can be placed into a bacteria, where it is sealed into the DNA chain using ligase. When the chromosome is once again sealed, the bacteria is now effectively re-programmed to replicate this new antiviral protein. The bacteria can continue to live a healthy life, though genetic engineering and human intervention has actively manipulated what the bacteria actually is. No doubt there are advantages and disadvantages, and this whole subject area will become more prominent over time.

Hope this benefits you.

Answer 8

Genetic engineering, recombinant DNA technology, genetic modification/manipulation (GM) and gene splicing are terms that are applied to the manipulation of genes, generally implying that the process is outside the organism's natural reproductive process. It involves the isolation, manipulation and reintroduction of DNA into cells or model organisms, usually to express a protein to reach desired effects. The aim is to introduce new characteristics or attributes physiologically or physically, such as making a crop resistant to a herbicide, introducing a novel trait, enhancing existing ones, or producing a new protein or enzyme. Successful endeavours include the manufacture of human insulin through the use of modified bacteria, the manufacture of erythropoietin in Chinese hamster ovary cells, and the production of new types of experimental mice such as the OncoMouse (cancer mouse) for research.

Since a protein sequence is specified by a segment of DNA called a gene, novel versions of that protein can be produced by changing the DNA sequence of the gene. There are a number of ways through which this could be achieved. After isolating a section of DNA that includes the gene, the gene or required portion of the gene is cut out. After modification of the sequence if necessary, it may be introduced (spliced) into a different DNA segment or into a vector for transformation into living cells. Daniel Nathans and Hamilton Smith received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their isolation of restriction endonucleases, which are able to cut DNA at specific sites. Together with ligase, which can join fragments of DNA together, restriction enzymes formed the initial basis of recombinant DNA technology. Some groups have argued[citation needed] that genetic engineering is wrong and is "doing the work of God", but most scientists believe that genetic engineering is essential to help future medical discoveries. However, even with regard to this technology's great potential, scientists around the world have raised concerns about the introduction of genetically engineered plants and animals into the environment and the potential dangers of human consumption of GM foods. They say that these organisms have the potential to spread their modified genes into native populations thereby disrupting natural ecosystems.


Applications :
The first genetically engineered drug was human insulin, approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration in 1982. Another early application of genetic engineering was to create human growth hormone as replacement for a drug that was previously extracted from human cadavers. In 1986 the FDA approved the first genetically engineered vaccine for humans, for hepatitis B. Since these early uses of the technology in medicine, the use of GE has expanded to supply many drugs and vaccines.

One of the best known applications of genetic engineering is the creation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

There are potentially momentous biotechnological applications of GM, for example oral vaccines produced naturally in fruit, at very low cost.

A radical ambition of some groups is human enhancement via genetics, eventually by molecular engineering.


Genetic engineering and research:

Although there has been a tremendous revolution in the biological sciences in the past twenty years, there is still a great deal that remains to be discovered. The completion of the sequencing of the human genome, as well as the genomes of most agriculturally and scientifically important plants and animals, has increased the possibilities of genetic research immeasurably. Expedient and inexpensive access to comprehensive genetic data has become a reality with billions of sequenced nucleotides already online and annotated.

Now that the rapid sequencing of arbitrarily large genomes has become a simple, if not trivial affair, a much greater challenge will be elucidating function of the extraordinarily complex web of interacting proteins, dubbed the proteome, that constitutes and powers all living things. Genetic modification permits alteration of the primary structure of proteins and has therefore become a powerful tool in analyzing structure-function relationships in protein research. The use of the term "genetic engineering" to describe the experimental genetic modification of whole organisms, however, suggests a level of precision and an understanding of developmental biological principles beyond what has been achieved.



Nonetheless, research progress has been made using a wide variety of techniques, including:

Loss of function, such as in a knockout experiment, in which an organism is engineered to lack the activity of one or more genes. This allows the experimenter to analyze the defects caused by this mutation, and can be considerably useful in unearthing the function of a gene. It is used especially frequently in developmental biology. A knockout experiment involves the creation and manipulation of a DNA construct in vitro, which, in a simple knockout, consists of a copy of the desired gene which has been slightly altered such as to cripple its function. The construct is then taken up by embryonic stem cells, where the engineered copy of the gene replaces the organism's own gene. These stem cells are injected into blastocysts, which are implanted into surrogate mothers. Another method, useful in organisms such as Drosophila (fruit fly), is to induce mutations in a large population and then screen the progeny for the desired mutation. A similar process can be used in both plants and prokaryotes.
Gain of function experiments, the logical counterpart of knockouts. These are sometimes performed in conjunction with knockout experiments to more finely establish the function of the desired gene. The process is much the same as that in knockout engineering, except that the construct is designed to increase the function of the gene, usually by providing extra copies of the gene or inducing synthesis of the protein more frequently.
'Tracking' experiments, which seek to gain information about the localization and interaction of the desired protein. One way to do this is to replace the wild-type gene with a 'fusion' gene, which is a juxtaposition of the wild-type gene with a reporting element such as Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) that will allow easy visualization of the products of the genetic modification. While this is a useful technique, the manipulation can destroy the function of the gene, creating secondary effects and possibly calling into question the results of the experiment. More sophisticated techniques are now in development that can track protein products without mitigating their function, such as the addition of small sequences which will serve as binding motifs to monoclonal antibodies.
Expression studies aim to discover where and when specific proteins are produced. In these experiments the DNA sequence before the DNA that codes for a protein, known as a gene's promoter is reintroduced into an organism with the protein coding region replaced by a reporter gene such as GFP or an enzyme that catalyzes the production of a dye. Thus the time and place where a particular protein is produced can be observed. Expression studies can be taken a step further by altering the promoter to find which pieces are crucial for the proper expression of the gene and are actually bound by transcription factor proteins; this process is known as promoter bashing.

Answer 9

Please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_engineering
http://www.safe-food.org/-issue/ge.html