Biotechnology is defined as using living organisms or their elements to create useful products for human benefits or to solve a problem. Historical examples of biotechnology are: fermentation, selective breeding, and the use of antibiotics. Modern examples of biotechnology consist of: Recombinant DNA technology and the Human Genome Project. There are about seven different applications involving biotechnology, but the one that interest me the most is Agricultural Biotechnology. Agricultural Biotechnology involves: transgenic crops, DNA tracking of seeds, and transgenic animals. It just seems to amaze me with the things that are involved in it as well as what it can do!
However, Agricultural Biotechnology is a collection of scientific skills used to enhance plants, animals, and microorganisms. It is said to be a safe and valuable biotechnology application that contributes to both the environmental and economic sustainability. In today’s world, farmers choose agricultural biotech crops for many reasons. They expand yield and decreases production cost. Saturated fat and increased isoflavone content are also traits that are beneficial to agricultural biotechnology. Crops in this application have been reviewed constantly and declared as safe by expert panels of the world.
An article that caught my attention about agricultural biotechnology is titled, “Low-production of Proinsulin in Tobacco and Lettuce Chloroplasts for injectable or oral delivery of function insulin and C-peptide” done by researchers, Diane Boynan and Henry Daniell. The research objective of this article was to find something for patients with type 1 diabetes which included, delivery of insulin via injection or pump since it was so exceedingly invasive and costly. Therefore, they tried crops to see if they’ll reduce the price and ease oral delivery through the production of chloroplast to obtain proinsulin. Tobacco and lettuce were transformed with the cholera toxin B subunit blended with human proinsulin (A, B, C peptides) consisting of three cleavage sites.
Moreover, methodology was used all throughout this agricultural biotechnology article with results to go along with them also. It’s a method used to describe actions that need to be taken to analyze a research problem and the application of particular methods or strategies used to recognize a problem. Coomassie staining and immunoblotting were used to decide whether the transgenic plants were expressing CTB-PFx3. Transplastomic and mature old leaves were ground to a power in liquid nitrogen while protein was removed with the inclusion of 300-500 uL. Transgenic lettuce plants were prepared in the same way as tobacco and varying dilutions of the samples were loaded onto a 12% SDS-PAGE gel for spot densitometric examination of protein concentration. Stability was explored due to the high levels of expression noticed in old leaves, and senescent dried lettuce leaves. Another methodology used in this article was, solubilization and furin cleavage of proinsulin. It was practicable to separate the protein as insertion bodies and transform into a soluble form to arrange the CTB-PFx3 for purification and cleavage assays. Solubilized and dialysed plant withdraws holding CTB-PFx3 were moved over a Ni-NTA column to facilitation purification. Fractions were removed in this methodology and ran on an SDS-PAGE gel and contemplated by Coomassie staining. In functional evaluation of cleavable proinsulin, CTB-PFx3 produced purified insulin that was injected into female C57BL/6 mice along with PBS as a negative control.
Insulin injections comes with many disadvantages as well. Some of them are: pain, itching, allergy, and lipodystrophy found at the injection site. The substitution approaches to insulin delivery helps diabetic populations meet their needs, medically. Some of the things took to solve these different types of problems are: buccal spray insulin, inhalable insulin, oral anti-diabetic drugs, and oral delivery of insulin. Inhalable insulin was approved by the FDA but it was removed from the shelf out of stores because of the low amount of sales and also the different side affects which can have something to do with lung functioning as well.
Overall, treatments that are available for type 1 diabetes are very painful and expensive. The current accesible insulin does not contain the C-peptide. CTB-proinsulin have been expressed throughout this article with three furin cleavage sites in both tobacco and lettuce chloroplast. It’s function was to produce insulin that may be processed in most cells found in the body. This will decrease the cost of production, as well as facilitate the possibility of delivering the C-peptide, which should be able to aid in the treatment of diabetic complications.