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5 Use of Biological Resources

This topic area applies earlier biology to agriculture, breeding and biotechnology. It is where the course becomes most overtly applied, drawing on ecology, inheritance and cell-level knowledge together.

Core Role

  • Explain how biological understanding is used to increase food production.
  • Link inheritance ideas to selective breeding, genetic modification and cloning.
  • Pull together ethics, efficiency and biological method in applied contexts.

Topic Pages

  • 5a Food Production: Food production applies biology to agriculture, fermentation and fish farming. The common theme is using living systems more efficiently while controlling the conditions that limit yield or survival. 3 learning objectives.
  • 5b Selective Breeding: Selective breeding uses inheritance knowledge to increase the frequency of desirable characteristics in plants and animals. The benefits are clear, but so are the genetic risks if variation is reduced too far. 2 learning objectives.
  • 5c Genetic Modification (Genetic Engineering): Genetic modification changes an organism by inserting a gene from another source. The key ideas are the molecular tools, the role of vectors and the practical uses of modified organisms. 3 learning objectives.
  • 5d Cloning: Cloning produces genetically identical copies. In this course the two main contexts are micropropagation in plants and cloning mammals by transferring a diploid nucleus into an enucleated egg cell. 3 learning objectives.