What is Biotechnology?

Plant biotechnology has been ongoing as long as farmers and plant breeders have tried to create crops with more desirable characteristics, such as plants that are taller or shorter, or more resistant to adverse growing conditions. Originally, they created new plants by cross-breeding. Cross-breeding shuffles the plant’s genes and results in variation, but it is unpredictable. In contrast, today’s genetic modification techniques define the desired characteristic and insert a gene that expresses it to improve the plant.

Advances in molecular biology in the 1970s made it possible to identify the specific gene responsible for a trait, isolate that gene, and transfer it from any type of organism to plant cells. Instead of making tens of thousands of genetic changes, genetic modification inserts a gene with a known single beneficial trait into the plant. Scientists know what the protein specified by the gene does, so it is a more targeted change with less unintentional disruption to the plant’s other genes. Plant breeders embraced genetic modification because it offered precision and a quicker way of obtaining a desired trait in a plant.

The United Nations defines biotechnology as "any technological application that uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives thereof, to make or modify products or processes for specific use." Biotechnology draws on the pure biological sciences (genetics, microbiology, molecular biology, biochemistry, embryology, cell biology) and in many instances is also dependent on knowledge and methods from outside the sphere of biology (chemical engineering, bioprocess engineering, information technology, biorobotics, and others).