Srinagar, Oct 20: The National Advisory Committee meeting of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) on ‘Production of Double Muscled Mass Farm Animals using CRISPR’ was held on Friday at Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir, Shalimar campus. The meeting reviewed the progress of a consortium of four institutions in producing genome-edited animals for double muscling.
The project is supported by ICAR under the National Agricultural Science Fund (NASF) for boosting animal protein productivity and production by speeding up the growth rate of sheep, goats and buffalo by switching of a muscle growth-related gene through CRISPR technology.
Vice Chancellor, SKUAST-K, Prof Nazir Ahmad Ganai, who was the chief guest in the inaugural function, termed such intervention as an initiative towards future-ready agriculture. He highlighted the need to embrace such technologies for a quantum jump in animal production by boosting animal productivity that can help to rear a lesser number of animals per unit space.
“This will in turn reduce pressure on space and resources and help in mitigating climate change by reducing the greenhouse emissions by animals,” he said.
