ABSTRACT
Domesticated buffaloes contribute significantly to global milk and meat production. In 2019, the global buffalo population of 208 million produced 133.75 million tons of milk and 4.2 million tons of beef. In Asian countries, such as India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the buffalo is considered a bovine animal of choice to mitigate the demand for milk and meat. In the past century, buffalo breeding programs have made significant improvements in the productivity of buffalo, but achievements are not similar to cattle. For achieving high productivity per animal, the population of low-producing buffaloes has been bred with high genetic merit bulls. During the last few decades, assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) such as artificial insemination (AI), embryo transfer (ET), and Ovum Pick-Up and in vitro fertilization (OPU-IVF) have been exploiting at a large scale to increase the population of productive animals. The aim of advanced ARTs is to multiply elite animals, particularly breeding bulls and bull mothers. Animal cloning is also one of the ARTs. It offers faster multiplication of known genotype animals. In India, animal cloning is well established in buffalo and several clones have been produced. To improve productivity of dairy animals, the Indian government aims to expand coverage of artificial insemination (AI), from an existing 30% coverage to 80-100% coverage. Therefore, there is a huge requirement for quality semen for breeding. Along with classical breeding technologies, buffalo cloning technology (BCT) can also be used to fulfill requirement of bulls. At present, India has 16 cloned bulls which can produce more than two million semen doses for breeding. The cloned bull semen can be used precisely to upgrade the population of non-descript buffalo, which is humongous, thereby helping to improve their productivity. However, application of BCT is limited to research organizations, and very few progenies have been produced using the semen of cloned bulls. As with other ARTs, whether BCT is employed in buffalo genetic improvement programs very much depends upon government policy.
