Genetic Engineering in Medicine Engineering
In medicine engineering, a host of techniques are used for manipulation of organic components in human body.
The process followed is that of pursuing the heredity and reproduction that helps the experts of medicine engineering to pin point the exact objective.
The term thus encompasses the artificial selection and all aspects of biomedical techniques involved in the realm of medicine engineering. Some examples are artificial insemination, gene manipulation, and cloning, each a unique feature of the realm of medicine engineering.
Gene cloning for example is a process in medicine engineering where DNA molecules from two or more sources are combined within the cells or in vitro. They are then inserted into host organisms where they are able to propagate. Such gene cloning is used to create new medicines that provide value to science, medicine, and agricultural items in medicine engineering.
The industrial aspect in medicine engineering is also not a subject to be undermined.
Basics of DNA technology in medicine engineering involve the combining of foreign genes in to the plasmids of bacteria. Plasmids are nothing but small rings of DNA but do not form the part of bacterium’s chromosome.
DNA is the carrier of genetic information; it achieves its effects by directing the synthesis of proteins. Most recombinant DNA technology involves the insertion of foreign genes into the plasmids of common laboratory strains of bacteria. Plasmids are small rings of DNA, and they are not part of the bacterium’s chromosome (the main repository of the organism’s genetic information).
Nonetheless, they are capable of directing protein synthesis. Like chromosomal DNA, they are reproduced and passed on to the bacterium’s progeny. Thus, by incorporating foreign DNA, for example, a mammalian gene, into a bacterium, researchers can obtain an almost limitless number of copies of the inserted gene.
Furthermore, if the inserted gene is operative, the modified bacterium will produce the protein specified by the foreign DNA.
A key step in the development of genetic engineering was the discovery of restriction enzymes in 1968 by the Swiss microbiologist Werner Arber. However, type II restriction enzymes, which are essential to genetic engineering for their ability to cleave a specific site within the DNA, as opposed to type I restriction enzymes, which cleave DNA at random sites, were not identified until 1969, when the American molecular biologist Hamilton O. Smith purified this enzyme. Drawing on Smith’s work, the American molecular biologist Daniel Nathans helped to advance the technique of DNA recombination in 1970–77, and demonstrated that type II enzymes could be useful in genetic studies.
Genetic engineering itself was pioneered in 1973 by the American biochemists Stanley N. Cohen and Herbert W. Boyer, who were among the first to cut DNA into fragments, rejoin different fragments, and insert the new genes into E. coli bacteria, which then reproduced.
Genetic engineering has advanced the understanding of many theoretical and practical aspects of gene function and organization. Through recombinant DNA techniques, bacteria have been created that are capable of synthesizing human insulin, human growth hormone, alpha interferon, a hepatitis B vaccine, and other medically useful substances. Plants may be genetically adjusted to enable them to fix nitrogen, and genetic diseases can possibly be corrected by replacing “bad” genes with “normal” ones.
Nevertheless, special concern has been focused on such achievements for fear that they might result in the introduction of unfavorable and possibly dangerous traits into microorganisms that were previously free of them—e.g., resistance to antibiotics, production of toxins, or a tendency to cause disease.
The “new” microorganisms created by recombinant DNA research were deemed patentable in 1980, and in 1986 the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the sale of the first living genetically altered organism—a virus, used as a pseudo rabies vaccine, from which a single gene had been cut.
Since then several hundred patents have been awarded for genetically altered bacteria and plants.
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