Haryana: India's first cloned desi Gir female calf, Ganga produced at NDRI

Last Updated30/03/2023

Recently, the National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI), Karnal has produced cloned female calves of the desi Cow breed Gir.

It is India's first cloned Gir female calf named Ganga.
To clone the Gir, oocytes are isolated from live animals using ultrasound-guided needles, and then, matured for 24 hours under control conditions.
The somatic cells of elite cows are used as donor genomes, which are fused with OPU-derived enucleated oocytes.
Following chemical activation and in-vitro culture, the developed blastocysts are transferred into recipient mothers to deliver the Gir calf.

The term cloning describes a number of different processes that can be used to produce genetically identical copies of a biological entity.
Cloning can be natural or artificial. 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.
Clones can also be produced through artificial means. Biotechnological methods are employed to produce such clones.
Molecular cloning: Copies of specific gene fragments are produced
Cellular cloning: single-celled organisms with the exact genetic content of the original cell are produced in cell cultures.
Organism cloning / Reproductive cloning: A multicellular clone is created generally through somatic cell nuclear transfer

The word “somatic” is derived from the Greek word soma, meaning “body”.
Hence, all body cells of an organism – apart from the sperm and egg cells, the cells from which they arise (gametocytes) and undifferentiated stem cells – are somatic cells