Introduction
It was long ago when Man realized that, along with animals and plants, he was also accompanied by some other organisms as well, and though which remained hidden from his eyes. Those organisms were unveiled by Anton Van Leeuwenhoek, who first saw the tiny organisms which accompanied Man through the lenses of microscope. Later it was found out that microorganisms inhabited each and every surface of earth, on man himself, or even inside him, resided under the earth or swayed in the very air we breathe in.
As the time progressed, humans scraped out advantages of microorganism sharing their world. They named them, classified them into groups and worked upon them and till today are researching their possible …show more content…
Microbes in Human Welfare
Nothing in the world can be categorized as harmful only. Same goes with the microbes. Not all microbes are at war with humans, in fact, the population of pathogenic microbes is far lesser than that of useful ones. Microbes can benefit humans and other plants and animal lives as well. Also, microbes are gaining importance in today’s developing technology because of which many important discoveries and inventions have been made possible. Biotechnology is the field emerging with full rush in the employment of microbes in human welfare. Following are the fields discussed in which microbes are being usefully employed.
Biotechnology
The applications of microbiology on a wider and a commercial level to produce common foods and chemicals and to ease the lives of humans, is known as Biotechnology. It uses microbes or other life forms to produce commercially used products. People have been exploiting microbes from centuries, and have been using biotechnology without realizing, in baking their breads, brewing wines, making yoghurt and manufacturing cheese. However, recently biotechnology has undergone a revolution because of the advent of recombinant DNA. It now goes from micro to nano level inside the cells and molecules, which allows the exploitation of microbes at a greater extent. Let …show more content…
Yeast is being used for brewing since 4300 B.C. which is one of the oldest applications of Biotechnology. Much more recently, yeast-producing recombinant human antibodies have been generated. Yeast is single celled eukaryotic microbes that belong to the kingdom fungi. In addition to having many structures that are similar to other eukaryotic cell, yeast also contain a number of membrane-enclosed organelles in the cytoplasm, a cytoskeleton and chromosome structures similar to human chromosomes. Yeast cells also have larger genomes than most bacteria. Moreover, mechanism of gene expression in yeast resembles those in human cells. These features make yeast a very valuable model organism for studying chromosome structure, gene regulation, cell division and cell cycle