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HYDERABAD, Oct. 4

SCIENTISTS in the country will soon take up an ambitious project of unravelling the genome of the Indian buffalo. The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) will fund the multi-institutional initiative, according to its Secretary, Dr Manju Sharma.

The Rs 6 crore project would be for a duration of three years. Among the major institutes to be involved in the project are the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) here, the National Institute of Immunology (NII), New Delhi, and the National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI), Karnal, she told newspersons on Friday.

DBT has already constituted an expert group with Dr Lalji Singh, Director of CCMB, and other scientists drawn from different Institutes to give a direction to the project. Broadly, the effort would be to map the entire genome of the Indian buffalo, study the functions of the genome and the characteristics, Dr Manju Sharma said.

Replying to questions on the impact of private biotech industry, especially Reliance attracting talent from the national laboratories, she agreed that a handful of researchers had joined companies as Reliance but it would not have a significant affect, since a lot of youngsters were joining the research groups in the laboratories.

Dr Sharma said in a way it was also good that challenging options were opening up for researchers in the biotechnology area with the involvement of private sector. DBT also was looking at collaborations with private companies for technology transfer and also production of diagnostics and vaccines.

The DBT Secretary had earlier inaugurated two national facilities at the CCMB — the Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorting Facility (FACS) and the National Facility for Transgenic and Gene Knockout Mice.

FACS is a useful tool for the analysis and sorting of animal and plant cells. The facility has been jointly funded by DBT, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and would be accessible to all major institutes and researchers.

The Transgenic Gene Knockout Mice facility on the other hand has been funded by CSIR and DST and would be very useful in the fields of drug discovery and functional Genomics, according to Dr Lalji Singh.

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