• Home
• /
• UAE

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.

Dr. Wani noted that none of the health issues faced by other cloned animals have been found in camels, noting that the problems are often due to the use of lesser-quality slaughterhouse material and “over-treatment” in which cloned animals are treated differently.

“We have not seen any of these things in camels,” he said. “No overweight babies have been produced, no big bellies, nothing.”

“Injaz is treated as any other camel,” he added. “She’s in a herd with the pregnant animals. No special care, no special feed, no special attention.”

In the future, Dr. Wani said cloning technology might be able to help with stem cell research for medical purposes, as cloned, patient-specific cells can be created for use in combating diseases in humans and animals.

Additionally, Dr. Wani believes that cloning technology has the potential to revitalise populations of endangered species or even restore already-extinct species.

“We have so many other species in the Gulf region and in the Middle East, so we can use cloning technologies to preserve those species,” he said.

“For example, right now we have wild Bactrian camels that are on the verge of extinction,” he said. “We have started doing some work on that. We’ll be using those cells and trying to produce those animals from dromedary camels.”

The Reproductive Biotechnology Centre has already established a “cell bank” in which the cells of various regional animals are frozen in liquid nitrogen.

“We can keep those cells for decades. If something happens to a particular animal, we can use those cells to produce a clone of that animal, a same copy of the same animal.”

bernd@khaleejtimes.com