General description
Today’s biotechnology is an exciting multidisciplinary science encompassing areas such as biology, biochemistry, genetics, bioinformatics and engineering science. For centuries, biotechnology has been used in the manufacture of beer, wine, cheese and bread. In recent history, biotechnology has been taken up in the pharmaceutical industry: Penicillin is used in the treatment of infections and insulin is given to patients suffering from diabetes. Moreover, biotechnology has gained increasing importance in other areas, for example bio-ethanol fuels, enzymes in washing powder, and bio-degradable plastic materials. Biotechnology plays a crucial role in the discovery and development of new pharmaceutical compounds and in the food industry. Bioinformatics, which uses the latest computer technology in the analysis of biological information, plays a central role in the development of new pharmaceutical products by exploiting the information obtained during the mapping of the humane genome.
In the environmental area, biotechnology is an important player in handling waste from industrial and agricultural production and the degradation of widely-diffused toxic compounds. In the future, biotechnological procedures will replace many classical processes in chemical synthesis and new biotechnological compounds will be launched that will be less harmful to the environment.
The general program in Biotechnology allows you to define your own biotechnological profile from a broad variety of courses within molecular biology, molecular ecology, environmental microbiology, mycology, protein chemistry, lipid chemistry, bioinformatics, process biotechnology and food biotechnology. Graduates in biotechnological engineering can influence the future development of this area.