Recently, the R&D team of Youran Dairy/SKX research institute, together with the team of Academician Zhang Yong from Northwest A&F University, successfully produced two cloned bulls in SKX National Breeding Farm, achieving the technical breakthrough such as the production efficiency of cloned embryos and pregnancy rate of transplanted recipients, which will be beneficing to the breeding of world-class dairy cattle with traditional genetic advantages used for China dairy industry.
Animal cloning is essential technology for genetic resource protection and breeding application in livestock. From early 2008, Youran Dairy/SKX Research Institute has started to developing animal cloning technology. It is an enterprise that has early carried out research on animal cloning in China, and who has successfully produced more than ten cloned animals of top dairy bulls and high-production performance dairy cows. The donor cells of the two cloned bulls used in this time, “Youyou” and “Xingxing” were derived from the skin tissues of top dairy bull with excellent performance tested by genetic evaluation, and we developed new cloning system to improving the production efficiency of cloned embryos by more than 30% and also increased significantly the pregnancy rate following embryo transplanted into recipients, which reaching a leading level of domestic cloning technology in the world industry.
At present, Youran Dairy/SKX has established an efficient cloning technology system for livestock of cattle, deer, dairy goats and other animals, which providing efficient technical support to protect the genetic resources of animals on the Inner Mongolia Plateau. Otherwise, Youran Dairy/SKX Institute has established the animal cell bank of Mongolia plateau and bioinformatic database in cooperation with Inner Mongolia University, and has collected over 168 species and 30,000 resource samples (somatic cells, semen and embryos), which including livestock of cattle, sheep and horses and also wild animal resources. At the same time, we have focused on of more than 20 species of Mongolian cattle, sheep and horses to investigating its special genetic characteristics in disease-resistant, stress-resistance and also reproduction else. The development of efficient cloning technologies of livestock will provide basic genetic materials and key technological support for the applications of modern biological breeding technologies such as stem cell genetic editing, the innovation of new strains of functionally enhanced dairy cattle with specific production performance, disease and stress resistance, low-carbon emission and adaptability to specific environments.
In the future, Youran Dairy/SKX will actively develop cutting-edge technologies in the field of livestock breeding and reproductive regulation such as whole-genome detection, stem cell genetic editing and animal cloning, apply them to dairy cattle, dairy goats, beef cattle and other livestock breeding industries, to promote the competitive power of China’s livestock breeding and also key technologies in the world.