Applications of Biochemistry Recent developments in biochemistry are changing the way we live our lives.
Biochemistry spills over into pharmacology, physiology, microbiology, and clinical chemistry. Biochemistry is applied to medicine, dentistry, and veterinary medicine. Biochemistry spills over into pharmacology, physiology, microbiology, and clinical chemistry.
In these areas, a biochemist may investigate the mechanism of a drug action; engage in viral research; conduct research pertaining to organ function; or use chemical concepts, procedures, and techniques to study the diagnosis and therapy of disease and the assessment of health. Some of the examples include:
In food science, biochemists research ways to develop abundant and inexpensive sources of nutritious foods, determine the chemical composition of foods, develop methods to extract nutrients from waste products, or invent ways to prolong the shelf life food products.
In agriculture, biochemists study the interaction of herbicides with plants. They examine the structure – activity relationships of compounds, determine their ability to inhibit growth, and evaluate the toxicological effects on surrounding life.
DNA samples are loaded to 96-well plate for PCR analysis. Some of the applications of biochemistry are as follows, where lot many chemicals involved in each
and every procedure:
Genetic engineering: Techniques to alter the chemistry of genetic material (DNA and RNA),
to introduce these into host organisms and thus change the phenotype of the host organism.
Nucleic acid blotting techniques (DNA, RNA and protein can be detected by blotting techniques)
Nucleic acid blotting is a well–established technique for locating a genomic region, gene, or
other sequence of interest from a complex mixture of DNA or RNA.
DNA sequencing DNA sequencing is the process of determining the precise order of nucleotides within a DNA molecule. It includes any method or technology that is used to determine the order of the four bases – adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine – in a strand of DNA. The advent of rapid DNA sequencing methods has greatly accelerated biological and medical research and discovery. (Ex: Human genome project is possible only due to DNA sequencing methods)
Polymerase chain reaction (The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a scientific technique in molecular biology to amplify a single or a few copies of a piece of DNA across several orders of magnitude, generating thousands to millions of copies of a particular DNA sequence.)