Raj Sheetal: India’s first live horse foal born through embryo transfer

In an effort to preserve the population of equines in the country, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research- National Research Centre on Equines (ICAR-NRCE) has successfully reproduced foals through embryo transfer by using both fresh as well as frozen semen recently in Marwari and Zanskari horse breeds. Continuing these successes in producing the foals through embryo transfer, scientists at Regional station, Equine Production Campus (EPC) of ICAR-NRCE, in Bikaner, Rajasthan, have successfully produced country’s first live horse foal born from embryo transfer, named Raj Sheetal. 

For producing this foal, the mare was inseminated with frozen semen and embryo was flushed on day 7.5 and the recovered embryo was vitrified using the customised cryodevices and was frozen in liquid nitrogen.

After two months, the embryo was thawed and transferred in the synchronised surrogate to obtain pregnancy. The surrogate mare delivered the healthy female foal on September 21.

The filly was healthy and weighed 20 kgs. This achievement was made by Talluri Thirumala Rao and his team, including Sajjan Kumar, RK Dedar, Jitender Singh, M Kutty, SC Mehta, TK Bhattacharya and Paswan. The team also has successfully vitrified 20 embryos of Marwari horse and three Zasnkari horse embryos as of now.

Congratulating the team of scientists, TK Bhattacharya, Director, ICAR-NRCE, said that this technology is the need of the hour as it would help in addressing the dwindling equine population in the country and with cryopreservation, embryos can be transported, exported and imported easily at the place of utility and can be implanted whenever possible.

Further, he elaborated that this feat is the first-of-its-kind in the country for equines.

Regional station head SC Mehta stressed upon the development of this kind of advanced and useful technologies for the conservation and propagation of the elite equines in the country. He also wished for more accolades for the institute.

The 19^th and 20^th livestock census in 2012 and 2019, respectively, revealed that the population of equines in the country has gone down by 52.71 per cent during this tenure.