Uttarakhand gets sex sorted semen lab to produe female calves

India’s first “Sexed Semen Production Centre” will come up at Rishikesh in Uttrakhand to produce female calves for indigenous Indian cattle. This would ensure that the cows inseminated with ‘sexed semen’  give birth only to female calves. Sexed semen technology is a breeding technology about preselecting the sex of offspring by sorting or separating the X-sperms from Y-sperms. This will help to produce more cows than bulls.

“In normal breeding, there are 50-50 chances that, we either get a bull or a cow. With sexed semen, in majority cases one gets a female progeny,” said officials of Agriculture Ministry. Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh has laid the foundation of the country’s first sex semen production centre at Rishikesh. The Centre is being set up as part of the Rashtriya Gokul Mission.

“The Centre has planned to set up 10 more such sorted semen centre across the country and global tender has been floated to this effect,” Singh said. According to officials, the technology is being adopted for this centre, was developed by the United States, to produce more cows than bulls. The project is being undertaken to increase milk productivity and the cow population.

Officials said that in sex sorted semen technology, the fractions of X-bearing (female) and Y-bearing (male) sperm are modified from the natural mix through sorting and selection. The new semen mix, which is formed, when impregnated will only yield female calves in almost 90% of the cases. The sorting process basically involves exploiting the differences in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) content between X-chromosome-bearing and Y-chromosome-bearing sperms. The former contains slightly more DNA, with the difference ranging from 3.6% to 4.2%, depending upon the breed of the cattle or buffalo. The process of sorting is done either by passing the sperm cells through a laser beam or by staining sperm with a DNA-binding fluorescent dye. 

 Data from the 19th livestock census shows that while the cattle population has dipped by 4.1 per cent in 2012 from 2007 (previous census period), the buffalo population has grown by 3.19 per cent during the same period. Further, the study notes that the percentage changes in milch buffalo population during the period 2003-07 and 2007-12 has increased by 46 per cent in rural areas.

“Cow is a better animal than buffalo to increase the farmers’ income. Cow can give you a better jump in milk yield and is more amenable to upgrading in breeding than a buffalo,” officials said.