Haryana: India’s first cloned desi Gir female calf, Ganga produced at NDR

Source: The post is based on the article “Haryana: India’s first cloned desi Gir female calf, Ganga produced at NDRI” published in Economic Times on 29th March 2023

What is the News?

The National Dairy Research Institute, based in Haryana’s Karnal, has produced the first-ever clone of a calf belonging to the indigenous Gir cow breed. The calf has been named Ganga.

What is Ganga?

It is India’s first cloned Gir female calf.

Scientists used three animals for producing this calf: Oocyte was taken from the Sahiwal breed, a somatic cell from the Gir breed, and a surrogate animal was a crossbreed.

Note: Gir, Sahiwal, Tharparkar, and Red Sindhi are among the Indian cattle breeds that are crucial for the Indian dairy industry’s growth as well as milk production.

What is Cloning?

Cloning involves a number of different processes that can be used to produce genetically identical copies of a biological entity. The copied material, which has the same genetic makeup as the original, is referred to as a clone.

Cloning can be natural or artificial:

Natural Cloning: Examples of cloning that occur naturally are as follows:

– vegetative reproduction in plants, e.g. water hyacinth producing multiple copies of genetically identical plants through apomixis

– binary fission in bacteria

Artificial Cloning: There are three different types of artificial cloning: 

1) Gene cloning is the use of highly specialised deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) technology to produce multiple, exact copies of a single gene or other segments of DNA to secure sufficient material to examine for research purposes. 

2) Therapeutic cloning produces embryonic stem cells for experiments aimed at creating tissues to replace injured or diseased ones.

3) Reproductive cloning is used to produce copies of the whole animal.