For International Women’s Day (IWD 2022) under the theme ‘Gender equality today for a sustainable tomorrow‘ “the ladies” of the Reproductive Technologies at the Centre for Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health were also celebrated in recognition of their significant contribution to the biobanking of African chicken genetics resources.
The Reproductive Technologies programme aims to demonstrate new precision-breeding technologies and ways they can accelerate the impact of tropical livestock genetics. Biobanking African poultry genetic resources to safeguard biodiversity is a strategic CTLGH project under which researchers have developed a novel technique based on cryopreservation of Primordial Germ Cells of important indigenous African poultry breeds.
Biobanked African chicken material is critical for future use to select/breed for more adapted, productive and resilient poultry breeds in the face of the climate change. The conserved genetic material will also be used to support CTLGH and partners efforts to identify genomic markers linked to other traits of interest that can then be introduced into existing chicken populations to sustain the African poultry industry.
Having cracked the difficult problem of chicken biobanking, the innovation of PGC preservation, will be coupled with sterile surrogate use, to further revolutionize the tropical poultry genetic improvement efforts in collaboration with the Tropical Poultry Genetics Solution project (TPGS), the National Agricultural Systems (NARS) in Africa and South East Asia and key regional livestock organisations like the African Union-InterAfrican Bureau for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR), the African Seed and Biotechnology Programme (ASBP) of the African Union Commission, the consortia line the African Animal Breeding Network (ABNet), among others.
To ensure the sustainability and adoption of these technologies, and to further promote broader participation of women scientists (from both French- and English-speaking background), the programme has embarked and delivered on the following additional activities:
- A laboratory training manual on biobanking and recovery of indigenous poultry genetic resources by cryopreservation of primordial germ cells (PGCs) developed is now available in English and French. The manual was designed is response to needs of the NARS and the regional gene banks established.
- Biobanking of two synthetic chicken lines KC1 and KC2 developed in KALRO-Naivasha, for which a total of 133 PGC lines (68 KC1 and 65KC2) have already been cryopreserved since the beginning of 2022.