Pharmaceutical biotechnology techniques

The health benefits of food and food constituents is currently gaining much attention. New biotechnological techniques allow the enrichment of food with micro- and macro-nutrients such as rice with high levels of vitamin A, tomatoes with extra flavonoids and also milk with additional calcium. These frmctional foods are often coimected with health benefits. Specific food constituents in a pharmaceutical formulation are called nutraceuticals. These are frequently associated with medical claims. 

The distinctions between vaccines and pharmaceuticals in terms of their underlying science and their R D processes can be murky, particularly as more therapeutic pharmaceuticals rely on biotechnological techniques to replicate substances naturally found in living organisms as many vaccines traditionally have done. 

Manipulation of genes is one of the major technologies in pharmaceutical biotechnology, so it is rather important to have an understanding of the techniques... 

The rate of plant propagation and improvement of yield of tryptophan indole alkaloids through biotechnological technique is important for commercial cultivation to meet the pharmaceutical demand of the said alkaloids. There are scanty references or literature in this direction. Few of the literature surveys are highlighted in Table 20.4. 

Although the techniques described have resulted in the determination of many protein stmctures, the number is only a small fraction of the available protein sequences. Theoretical methods aimed at predicting the 3-D stmcture of a protein from its sequence therefore form a very active area of research. This is important both to understanding proteins and to the practical appHcations in biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industries. 

Progress in instrumentation has considerably improved the sensitivity of fluorescence detection. Advanced fluorescence microscopy techniques allow detection at single molecule level, which opens up new opportunities for the development of fluorescence-based methods or assays in material sciences, biotechnology and in the pharmaceutical industry. 

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