Needs of Biotechnology- The population of india is more than 1 billion and as per projection it may cross 1.5 billion by 2030. This will bring huge burden on biological resources (animal/plant) to provide food for all. Naturally occurring animal, plant or microbial strains have few limitations for them to be utilized for desired products due to following reasons-

1. Purity of the living stock

2. Production of undesired products

3. Secretion of toxic metabolic by-products

4. Inability to withstand harsh biochemical processes/treatments.

5. Higher production cost

6. Susceptible to disease and other environmental conditions

The existing technology today enables us to engineer plants and animals makeing them suitable for maximum production. Living organism has a complex cellular structure, metabolic pathways, genetic make-up, behavior in the synthetic growth media and understanding these processes can help us to modulate specific process/environmental condition or metabolic pathways to achieve the goal of biotechnology. Advancement in different fields of science has paved ways to solve several issues responsible for lower yield of products. Few of the selected science research areas contributing into the development of biotechnology are given in the Figure 1.2. The foundation of biotechnology relies on the research & development activities in different areas of science and interaction of interdisciplinary areas. The research in the field of plant biotechnology allowed us to produce plants through micro-propagation but with the evident advancement of genetic engineering, it is now possible to produce plant with predefined characteristics imprinted at genetic level through genetic engineering. The similar relationship may also exist for many other overlapping areas and as a result biotechnological operation output is amplified several folds.