Genetic Engineering
The key to genetic engineering is a component of living things called a genome. One of its discoverers, biologist Francis Crick called it "the secret of life"
A genome holds a full set of nature's instruction for growing a specific plant or animal and keeping it alive. By changing these instructions, scientists can change the way living things grow and behave. And that’s what genetic engineering is all about - changing living things by changing their genomes.
Genome
* Hold’s a full set of nature’s instruction for growing a specific plant or animal and keeping it alive.
* By changing these instructions, scientists can change the way living things grow and behave.
* And that’s what genetic engineering is all about – changing living things by changing their genome.
A genome is all of the genes in all of the chromosomes of an organism. Every gene tells a living organism how to make or do something different. Genes work by instructing cells to make proteins.
Since the early 1980s, scientists have engineered the genomes of plants, animals and even a few humans. Every day we eat food that has been engineered. You may even have an engineered pet one day.
Inventing Plants
* Until 1980s, genetic engineering did not exist.
* Before people began farming, they gathered food from plants where ever the plants happened to grow.
* They could select and plant the seeds of only the best-tasting most nutritious plant foods.
* They could also breed to slightly different plants together to create a third, even better plant, such improved plants are called hybrids.
Selective Breeding – the process of choosing plants to rise. It has the same goal as genetic engineering.
- In the 1980s, scientist began using genetic engineering to plants.
- Genetic engineers can do what selective breeders never could.
- They can take a gene from one species and add it to the genome of another and they...