Recent biotechnological approaches that have been used to enhance the Essay

Recent biotechnological approaches that have been used to enhance the yield and diversity of amino acids, vitamins, antibiotics - Essay Example These enrichments are only possible with Biotechnology. In the agriculture sector, many technologies are used such as genetic manipulation and gene transfer, development of recombinant vaccines, molecular markers, DNA-based disease diagnosis and characterization, embryo transfer and in vitro propagation of plants. In the food industry, the food processing is the main part where biotechnology intermission is required. For the improvement of the bacterial strains, genetic modification of the strains for the food processing microorganisms by the identification, characterization and alteration is done. Thus biotechnology has vast applications in many fields. Biofuels: As the fossil fuels are very limited, the search for the alternative methods that are renewable and safe are looked upon. The biological fuels such as ethanol, methane, hydrogen etc., are increasing day by day. To improve the production quality of these biofuels, the biotechnological approaches are used. The drawbacks of th ese methods such as low yield, high cost of feed, ad lack of active micro organisms can be overcome by using biotechnological approaches. ... Here the metabolic pathway is altered. The glucose metabolism towards the metabolic pyruvate formate lyase pathway by interrupting the succinate producing and lactate producing pathways. (Yoshida et al. 2006). By this technique the yield of hydrogen was increased from 1.08 mol/mol glucose to 1.83 mol/mol glucose which is 190 percent increase in the yields when compared to the wild strain hydrogen production. (Yoshida et al. 2006). The maize is used for the production of biofuel nowadays. The distillery soluble waste obtained after the ethanol production called as dried distiller grain soluble (DDGS), is usually left out as cattle feed. The researchers have found that this DDGS has a lot of nutritional value and if the feed is improved with amino acid and vitamin content, it can be used for swine and poultry. (Ufaz and Galili 2008). Lignocellulostic biomass is widely used as the main source of sugars for the fermentation to biofuels and other energy sources. These sugars are present b ound to the plant cell walls. The process of overcoming these barriers by the use of some break through technologies is termed as â€Å"biomass recalcitrance†. (Tomes and Lakshmanan 2010). Pretreatment of the biomass and then using it as the raw material for biofuel production will result in better yield. As lignin is not degraded easily by the protease enzymes, some modification to the substrate is very essential. Lignin hinders its active site form the enzymes and also binds reversibly to the proteins, because of this nature of lignin the enzymatic conversion is very less. So an alternative approach of increasing the pore size of the biomass can help to increase the enzymatic activity. Enzymes such as cellulase and hemicellulase are used for the