Injaz, worlds first cloned camel, celebrates her birthday

World’s first cloned camel celebrates sixth birthday and a pregancy with cake in Dubai

Dubai — Injaz, Arabic for achievement, is a female dromedary born on April 8, 2009. To make the occasion even more memorable, researchers at the Reproductive Biotechnology Centre in Nad Al Sheba announced another milestone: Injaz is now pregnant.

Injaz was created using the ovarian cells of an adult camel slaughtered in 2005, which were then cultivated in tissue culture and frozen in liquid nitrogen.

In the cloning process, one of the extracted cells is injected into an egg, which is matured in the lab using an incubator. The nucleus of the egg is then removed, replaced with that of the donor cell, and reprogramed by chemical or electric stimulus.

If the process is achieved successfully, the nucleus fuses with the egg as if it were a naturally formed embryo, which is transferred into the surrogate mother after being cultured for seven or eight days. Following a full-term pregnancy, the surrogate gives birth.

Since Injaz was born, dozens of other cloned camels have been born in the UAE. In 2012, another camel clone, a black dromedary named “Sooty”, became the first camel cloned using the cells of a beauty pageant queen.

Dr. Nisar Ahmad Wani of the Reproductive Biotechnology Centre said that camels are cloned for a wide variety of purposes.

“We get a lot of requests to clone a particular animal, whether it’s a very good camel that produces 20 litres of milk, a bull who has a very high pedigree, racing champions, or beauty queens. Those animals sell for a lot of money so people want to have a copy of them.”

Dr. Wani added that advances in technology over the six years since Injaz’s birth have allowed the lab to have a greater success rate in terms of pregnancies that results from the embryo transfers.

“We’ve been improving the process from that day,” he said. “Injaz was produced from seven pregnancies we achieved from about 400 embryos we transferred. But now we have good recipient selection of animal surrogate mothers, have defined our lab protocols, and are now getting very good pregnancy rates.”

“We’re proud to say that (the pregnancy rates) are better than most of the very good labs in the world, most of which say that they are getting between one and five per cent pregnancy rates. We are getting more than ten per cent,” he added.

Skin cells instead of ovarian cells

Recent developments in the use of skin cells rather than ovarian cells have made it much easier to clone camels, as it is easier for an owner to collect a pinch of skin rather than use the invasive methods required to collect cells from internal organs.

Since the birth of the world’s first cloned animal — a Scottish-born sheep named Dolly — in 2006, a wide variety of animals have been cloned, including cattle, horses, dogs, water buffalo and wolves.

According to data compiled by the Humane Society, almost 99 per cent of animal cloning attempts fail to produce healthy offspring, and many clones live shorter-than-average life spans with significant health problems, often due to their large size relative to natural-born animals.

bernd@khaleejtimes.com