What is Biotechnology?
Biotechnology is a scientific method for improving or modifying a plant’s genetic structure. It is a tool that can provide benefits to farmers, consumers and the environment.
Farmers have used genetic modification for centuries. But in the past, genetically modifying a plant involved many generations of crossbreeding and hybridization. Virtually every crop grown commercially for food or fiber is a product of this genetic modification process. The drawback of this method is that it allows genes of unknown function to move into our crops along with the desired genes.
Biotechnology allows plant breeders to be more precise, selecting single genes that produce desired traits and moving them from one plant or organism to another.
Genetic Modification Timeline
The corn today’s consumers are familiar with has been dramatically modified from what many scholars believe to be its wild ancestor, a grass called teosinte (tee-o-sin-tay). These earliest ears of corn were the size of your little finger and looked more like grass than modern yellow corn.
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For more information about biotechnology, see the following pages:
What Can Biotechnology Do?
What’s Bt Corn?
Iowa Corn’s Position on Biotechnology
Plant-made Pharmaceuticals
Links
Information throughout this section was compiled from various sources, including the Biotechnology Industry Organization and the Council for Biotechnology Information.