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Future of Conservation

  The Frozen Frontier: Why the Future of Conservation is Hidden in a Lab We are a culture that consumes the wild through a lens of high-definition fascination. We spend billions on eco-tourism and nature documentaries, captivated by the raw power of a hunting leopard or the ancient migration of an elephant. Yet, beneath this visual obsession lies a staggering biological blind spot. We have become experts at tracking an animal across a continent via satellite, yet we remain "reproductively illiterate" regarding the very mechanisms that allow those species to exist in the first place. Protecting a forest or a savannah is a vital first step, but habitat preservation is a hollow victory if the animals within them are biologically failing. As the conservationist Aldo Leopold famously noted in 1948, "Wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them." Today, we are learning that progress—in the form of human-driven extinction—is outpacing our un...
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The Genesis of Genetics

The Genesis of Genetics The first humans on Earth must have pondered upon the observation that children resembled their parents more than other members of their population. But unfortunately, we do not have record of their ideas as to why this occurred. Hippocrates and Aristotle were obviously extensively thoughtful about this fact that they developed theories to explain resemblance among relatives. The story of genetics begins long before the term was coined. Ancient civilizations, including the Greeks and Romans, noticed that traits could be passed down from parents to offspring. However, they lacked the scientific framework to explain these observations. The true genesis of genetics awaited the advent of modern science. Genetics as we know today, based on the "gene theory of inheritance", began with the work of Gregor Johann Mendel who is appropriately called the "father of genetics". His precedent-setting experiments with garden peas, published ...
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13 More Breeds Added to The List

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India, as is known for its biodiversity, is also a megadiverse nation in terms of livestock with a total of about 536 million livestock population at present. In 2007, recognizing the need for an authentic national documentation system of valuable sovereign animal genetic resource,  Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR)  has initiated a mechanism for “Registration of Animal Germplasm” by giving temporary authority to  National Bureau of Animal Genetic Resources (NBAGR) , Karnal. Subsequently, in 2008, ICAR constituted a  Breed Registration Committee (BRC)  under the chairmanship of Deputy Director General (Animal Science), ICAR and having members from  National Biodiversity Authority (NBA)  and  Dept. of Animal Husbandry Dairying & Fisheries, Govt. of India  for registration of new breeds. This mechanism is the sole recognised process for registration of livestock and poultry breeds at the national level. Since then, ICAR-NBAGR ...
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