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The Pros And Cons Of Genetic Engineering

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Technology has become a major role in Australian and Global agriculture. There are several aspects of technology which have developed each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Genetic testing for traits in livestock and crops has been developed to help breed successful livestock and plants. Artificial insemination was developed as a safer means for animals to mate with human intervention while frozen embryo use has been developed to help aid in birthing and embryo transfer. Cloning has also become a modern day issue which is being used to develop more sustainable means of agriculture. Despite each technologies positives there are several negatives associated with the practice.
Genetic testing is a highly technical and developed strategy …show more content…

Agriculturally the process is beneficial as it allows a female to produce more offspring in their lifetime and can increase the rate of genetic improvement in the species. The process of frozen embryo transfer is as follows: A donor and recipient animal are identified and given prostaglandin shots to synchronize oestrus cycles. A high quality, female animal is impregnated and after one week the embryos are flushed out of the animal and collected. The embryos are than implanted into a recipient animal. The egg will than attach to the uterus and pregnancy and birth will continue. The genetic improvement of a species occurs via the use of frozen embryos due to the advantage that a female animal of high genetic quality will be able to have more high quality offspring in their lifetime. The female animal does not have to carry the pregnancy and therefore can provide a fertilized eggs every oestrus …show more content…

The clone is an exact genetic duplicate of the parent and develops from a single cell. When cloning is successful the offspring will have all the genetic traits the parent did however the physical traits are not identical as the animals environment impacts on how genes as expressed physically (meaning you would not clone an animal due to its physical looks). This allows for characteristics such milk, meat, plant yield and other features to be passed onto a child which will allow for a high profit, high quality animal. This strategy is often useful if an animal and their characteristic/combination of characteristics is rare and superior and can help prevent a characteristic from weakening or being lost during the chance combinations that occur from sexual

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