Seventh buffalo calf in five years.
By The American Bazaar Staff
NEW DELHI: India’s National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI) has produced its seventh cloned buffalo calf, with its latest addition having been born exactly one month ago, on May 2.
The NDRI, which is India’s leading institute dedicated to dairy-based research, produced the first-ever buffalo clone in the world back in 2009, by utilizing adult buffalo cells natural parturition produce a baby calf that was an exactly genetic replica of its parent. The technique that NDRI uses is called “advanced hand-guided cloning technique.”
NDRI’s latest clone has been named Lalima, and was born weighing just less than 80 pounds. Over the last month, it has grown to about 92.5 pounds, and is said to be healthy, which is good news for the NDRI after it lost one of its cloned calves just 21 days after its birth last year.
Speaking to The Hindustan Times, NDRI Director A.K. Srivastava explained that Lalima only contains the genetic code of her mother, not both parents, and has no signs whatsoever of being in poor or physically unwell condition.
The purpose of delving in buffalo cloning is to ultimately be able to produce specimens that yield the most milk, which tends to be genetic. For a buffalo to be elite, it needs to produce around 1,000 pounds of milk in a period of just over 300 days, an enormous sum.
These “elite buffalos” are relatively rare, however, despite the fact that India has the world’s largest population of buffaloes and more than half of the country’s citizens drink predominantly buffalo milk.
Since its inception in 1923, NDRI has been at the cutting-edge of dairy research throughout the subcontinent. Some of the achievements made in its more than 90 years of existence include the birth of the world’s first in vitro fertilization buffalo calf in 1990, and the establishment of state-of-the-art educational facilities and curricula for budding researchers.
NDRI is based in Karnal, Haryana, despite having been founded originally in Bangalore. It offers B.Tech, Masters, and Ph.D.-level courses in dairy-related fields of study, and is considered one of the best institutions in the world for such education.