Traditional Biotechnology

Long before 'biotechnology' was a word, or a laboratory science, it was already a kitchen practice - people fermenting milk into curd, grain into bread, and fruit into wine using naturally occurring microbes, with no understanding of (and no attempt to alter) the underlying genetics. That is what 'traditional' or 'conventional' biotechnology means in this chapter: it exploits organisms exactly as nature provides them, relying entirely on their pre-existing natural metabolic capabilities rather than any deliberate genetic modification. The two subsections that follow cover its two main strands in the chapter's scheme - fermentation (the metabolic conversion process itself, and the bioreactors used to scale it up industrially) and single-cell protein (using the resulting microbial biomass directly as a …