Plant, Animal and Microbial Biotechnology: notes and questions
For BT students
Notes for each topic, a formula sheet, practice questions and 24 past GATE questions from 7 papers (2019–2026), 23 of them solved step by step.
- previous-year questions
- 24previous-year questions
- solved step by step
- 23solved step by step
- GATE papers, 2019–2026
- 7GATE papers, 2019–2026
- topics with notes
- 5topics with notes
Foundation
Learn the subject one topic at a time. Each topic has notes, the key formulas and practice questions.
Topic notes and formulas
Notes on every topic, with the key formulas and practice.
Plant tissue culture, regeneration and secondary metabolites
Plant cells can regain the ability to form any tissue (totipotency), and tissue culture exploits this by steering cell fate with plant growth regulators on defined media.
6 practice questions
Protoplast fusion and transgenic plants
Protoplasts are plant cells with the wall removed.
6 practice questions
Animal cell culture: media, preservation and growth
Animal cell culture grows cells taken from animal tissue outside the body, in nutrient media under controlled temperature, pH, osmolality and gas conditions.
5 practice questions
Hybridomas, stem cells, cloning and transgenic animals
This topic covers how animal cells are made immortal, pluripotent, cloned or genetically edited: hybridoma technology for monoclonal antibodies, stem cells and their potency, somatic cell nuclear transfer, and transgenic, knock-out and knock-in animals.
7 practice questions
Microbial products, recombinant protein production and screening
This topic covers how microbes are grown at scale to make biomass, primary and secondary metabolites, biofuels, bioplastics, industrial enzymes and recombinant proteins, how these products are recovered and purified, the basics of clinical, food and industrial microbiology, and how new products are found by screening.
6 practice questions
Plant, Animal and Microbial Biotechnology formulas by topic
GATE
Past GATE questions on Plant, Animal and Microbial Biotechnology by topic and year, the full papers, practice and the GATE syllabus.
24 questions, by topic and year
How many questions each topic had in the BT papers of each year. This shows what was asked, not what will be asked. We placed each question under a topic ourselves; the exam paper does not label topics.
| Topic | 2019 | 2020 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plant tissue culture | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 3 | · | · | 8 |
| Transgenic plants | 1 | 1 | · | 1 | · | 1 | · | 4 |
| Animal cell culture | 2 | 1 | 1 | · | 1 | · | · | 5 |
| Hybridomas & transgenics | 1 | · | · | 1 | · | · | 1 | 3 |
| Microbial products | · | · | 1 | · | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
Solved papers
The 2019 paper and its key are IIT Madras's own copies.
30 practice questions
The GATE syllabus for Plant, Animal and Microbial Biotechnology, paper by paper
From the GATE 2027 syllabus PDF: BT Section 5, “Plant, Animal and Microbial Biotechnology”, in its three parts: Plants, Animals and Microbes. Section 6 lists the Ti plasmid among cloning vectors, and Section 4 covers the kinetics of cell growth and downstream processing for bioprocesses in general.
Show the GATE BT wordingHide the GATE BT wording
Plants: Totipotency; Cell fate transition, direct and indirect organogenesis, regeneration of plants; Plant growth regulators and elicitors; Tissue culture and cell suspension culture system - methodology, kinetics of growth and nutrient optimization; Production of secondary metabolites; Hairy root culture; Plant products of industrial importance; Artificial seeds; Somaclonal variation; Protoplast, protoplast fusion - somatic hybrid and cybrid; Transgenic plants - direct and indirect methods of gene transfer techniques; Selection marker and reporter gene; Plastid transformation. Animals: Culture media composition and growth conditions; Animal cell and tissue preservation; Anchorage and non-anchorage dependent cell culture; Kinetics of cell growth; Micro & macro- carrier culture; Hybridoma technology; Stem cell technology; Animal cloning; Transgenic animals; Knock-out and knock-in animals. Microbes: Production of biomass and primary/secondary metabolites - Biofuels, bioplastics, industrial enzymes, antibiotics; Large scale production and purification of recombinant proteins and metabolites; Clinical-, food- and industrial- microbiology; Screening strategies for new products.
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