WHAT IS GENETIC ENGINEERING?
Genetic engineering opens the door to the era of new genetically modified species, recently with the help of CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). Okay I know it sounds too technical for newbie readers to understand so, let me make it sound more understandable. Genetic Engineering is the direct manipulation of genomes (simply known as genes) to get desired genetic makeup and characteristics(phenotype) in the targeted organism. In simpler words, it is a process to delete or manipulate a mutant gene within or beyond the boundaries of species with the help of biotechnology like cloning and transformation.
You would have seen many movies, featuring genetic engineering in different ways like; X-Men, spiderman, Jurassic world, etc. The organism resulted in genetic engineering is called, Genetically Modified Organism (GMO).
APPLICATION OF GENETIC ENGINEERING:
Many organisms and crops have been modified using different techniques. It has a vast application in all the major fields:
- Medical: In medical field hormones like insulin, estrogen, and other life-saving clotting factors are made. Genetic engineering is used to help solve infertility problems. And is also used to knock out some diseases. In 2018, over 57% of people said genetic testing was reliable.
- Agriculture: Many crops are genetically modified to get more nutritional and virus, bacteria resistant crops and have helped to ensure continued and better yields of crops. In 2018 it was recorded that about 191.7 million hectors of the world crops, were genetically modified.
- Industries: It is used to produce different enzymes and hormones etc. For industrial use. Contact lens solutions and polymerization of polymers are also done.
- Research Work: By recombining DNA of different organisms new resulting mutants are studied. In 2017 National Institute for Health (NIH) funded around 8.5 billion dollars for genetic engineering.
TECHNIQUES:
There are many techniques like cloning, TALEN, CRISPR, etc. However, the discovery of CRISPR has outmatched all other techniques due to its simplicity and efficiency but I am not going inside the topic deeply, for more information about CRISPR visit this website.
Advantages and disadvantages:
Throughout our article, we’ve only talked about the advantages reaped from the development of genetic engineering, but there are some serious risks that scientists have to face while using it.
- Genetic engineering has allowed us to mutate genes, but what will happen if these genes keep mutating over time, in this way many new diseases, deformities will be at our doorsteps.
- The deformities and other genetic problems may not appear in the targeted organism but later generations.
- Many problems arise with an ethical point of view, according to many critics, by the development of genetic engineering, we are interfering with the work that only suits to GOD, ‘creation’.