What are the Colors of Biotech?

Modern biotechnology arose in the late 20th century and is currently proving to be one of the key solutions to today's problems, especially regarding health and the environment.

According to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, Biotechnology is defined as “any technical application that uses biological systems, living organisms or parts of them to make or modify products or processes with specific uses”.

Given that those products can be of many types, Biotechnology can cover a wide number of applications: from increasing the quality and resistance of farm crops, to keeping hospital patients healthy by keeping track of their vital signs -and, of course, engineering enzymes for industrial use.

The Colors of Biotech

As a way to structure this vast array of biotech possibilities, scientists started to categorize them by color. Each branch, a different color. That’s why you’ll often hear about the Rainbow Code of Biotechnology.

So what does each color represent in this biotech rainbow?

• • Blue Biotech covers the aquatic and marine fields, by using ocean resources to create products and industrial applications.

• • Green Biotech has to do with everything agriculture-related, focused on improving crops in an accurate, targeted way.

• • Red Biotech centers on Healthcare, by developing an advanced class of drugs and therapies

• • Yellow Biotech covers Food Production

• • Brown Biotech for when Deserts and dry regions are involved

• • Golden Biotech is focused on the use of Bioinformatics, Computational Science, Agile organization and analysis of biological data. We recently wrote a post about what is Golden Biotech in more detail.

• • Gray Biotech encompasses the Environment and biodiversity, environmental protection, maintenance of biodiversity and removal of pollutants

• • White Biotech is for Industrial processes and gene based technologies, as well as the use of enzymes and microorganisms to produce biobased products

• • Purple Biotech is reserved for the laws, ethics and philosophy revolving around biotechnology

• • Black Biotech, as you can imagine, focuses on a darker topic: Bioterrorism and biological warfare

At ZYMVOL we are part of the golden branch of biotechnology, since we use computational approaches to improve and enable the discovery of industrial enzymes. For that, we use technology based on computational molecular modeling, machine learning and other tools that allow us to fully understand and work with the chemical structure and interactions between enzyme, substrate and its environment.

We are golden, but our technology can help develop solutions in all other colors!

References:

Convention on Biological Diversity (2006). Convention Text. Article 2. Use of Terms. https://www.cbd.int/convention/articles/?a=cbd-02

Kafarski, P. (2012). Rainbow Code of Biotechnology. CHEMIK. 66(8), 811-816.