Applied Zoology and Biotechnology

The term ‘biotechnology’ was used before the twentieth century for traditional activities such as making dairy products such as cheese and curd, as well as bread, wine, beer, etc. But none of these could be considered biotechnology in the modern sense. Genetic alteration of organisms through selective breeding, plant cloning by grafting, etc. do not fall under biotechnology More than a decade into the first human genome sequencing, the use of bioinformatic analysis has been steadily increasing. There are more web-based freely available databases and analytical tools than ever before. Modern biology has pervaded even the social sciences. For example, sociologists and psychologists are now probing how the epigenomic effects of environmental factors (including social factors) might shape the personality and behavior of the offspring postnatally. The National Center for Biotechnology Information has established an epigenomics database, which will be immensely useful to scientists in the near future. Thus, bioinformatics has been slowly but steadily pervading all branches of biology and beyond. In keeping with this, more and more bioinformatics books are being written for experts, which do not necessarily cater to the needs of the non-experts. People are studying biotechnology in different ways. Some people are devoted to developing new computational tools, both from software and hardware viewpoints, for the better handling and processing of biological data. They develop new models and new algorithms for existing questions and propose and tackle new questions when new experimental techniques bring in new data. Other people take the study of bioinformatics as the study of biology with the viewpoint of informatics and systems. These people also develop tools when needed, but they are more interested in understanding biological procedures and mechanisms. They do not restrict their research to computational study, but try to integrate computational and experimental invest.