Biotechnologies also prove effective for BASIC RESEARCH, because everything aimed at optimizing the production of the secondary metabolite corresponds to a physiological knowledge of a specific organism.
A marginal topic of biotechnology is MICROPROPAGATION: this term refers to the removal of apexes from the stem of official plants, which are placed in vitro to obtain whole plants. This path is chosen to obtain a large number of plants to be placed in the field, to improve agronomic cultivation and to isolate healthy cells from a diseased organism; for this reason it is associated with biotechnologies.
A typical definition of a biotechnological element is that of PROTOPLAST: plant cell deprived of the wall and used in basic research and in the regeneration of crops. Protoplast is the plant cell grown in vitro, deprived of the wall by adding a "suitable concentration of cellulase, an enzyme that hydrolyzes the cellulose chains. Physiologically, the cell wall is a structure capable of counteracting the pressure of cell turgor, determined by the vacuole's ability to attract water and the wall's ability to obstruct this pressure thanks to its semi-rigid structure. A plant cell without a wall in a normal environment would explode (logically it is a cell grown in a liquid medium ).
To obtain the protoplasts, the plant cells are placed in liquid medium, then in a solution. The culture media are not iso-osmotic environments in general, but for the cultivation of cells deprived of walls it is necessary to keep under control the osmolarity of the culture medium, to allow them to grow.
The cultivation of protoplasts, very expensive and particular, requires specific biological skills, because, although it does not have a wall, the protoplast is still a cell with its own catabolism and anabolism. The system must be continuously monitored and modified to keep its osmolarity unchanged. For this reason, the protoplast is used by research laboratories for the study of cell metabolism and for the genesis of highly productive cells.
The protoplast is ultimately a eukaryotic animal cell equipped with a vegetable vacuole and plastids.
It is possible to attack the nucleus of the protoplast and insert vegetative elements into it, transforming it into an improvement laboratory; in this way small portions of DNA, introduced into the nucleus in the form of tungsten micro-projectiles and containing the information necessary to improve the production processes, are incorporated into the genome and induce a metabolic change. The genetically transformed protoplasts can be brought back into a normal plant cell, because they have been deprived of the wall but not of their ability to regenerate it; therefore, reintroduced into a liquid medium without cellulase, they rebuild the cell wall, returning to be plant cells with ameliorative nucleic annexes.
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