DHAKA: A group of Bangladeshi scientists revealed the genome code of buffalo, known in the country as ‘Black Gold’.

The head of the group, a livestock scientist of Bangladesh, told banglanews that this revealing would help us to get better quality buffalo to meet the demand of protein, calcium and other ingredients.

Buffalo Whole Genome Sequencing Historical step towards advancement of Science First in the world, Pride of Bangladesh Buffalo is one of the prime sources of animal protein supply in Bangladesh.

A noticeable portion of Meat and milk from cattle source comes from Buffalo. The costal belt and riverine regions of Bangladesh are the main rearing sites of buffalo.

Presently, world especially Indian sub-continent buffalo is reared in farm system but Bangladesh buffalo is reared in traditional systems though the farming of buffalo will be more beneficial than cattle farming.

Rearing of buffalo will be more beneficial than cattle because buffalo is more stress resistant than cattle and meat and milk of buffalo is more nutritious than cattle.

The fat percentage of buffalo is around 8% whether it contains around 1-3% in cattle. Moreover, the fat percentage in meat of buffalo is much lower than the cattle. Along with the per capita meat and milk production buffalo is higher than cattle. Bangladesh having about 2 million buffaloes stands 9th in Asia in terms of population.

There is still a big gap between demand and supply of both meat and milk. In Bangladesh per head milk consumption is 30 ml instead of 250 ml that is recommended by FAO. The situation is same for meat. Currently nearly 42 kilograms of meat is produced per person worldwide.

Per head per year meat consumption in Bangladesh is 7.3 Kg. However, World Health Organization (WHO) recommended meat requirement is 80 Kg per capita per year. Renowned animal scientists of Lal Teer of Bangladesh and BGI of China jointly unveiled the whole genome sequence of riverine buffalo first time in the history of the world.

The de novo sequencing was done by Illumina’sHiSeq technology. 17-mer was used and the estimated genome size is 2.946 Gb.SOAP de novowas used for the assembly of the genome.Total 21,550 genes were identified. The average gene length was 23,394 bpand the average exon per gene was 8. 117 bp and 3,116 was the average length of exon and intron respectively.

Five protein databases (InterPro, Gene ontology, KEGG, Swissprot and TrEMBL) were chosen for prediction of genes function. Only 724 genes among 21,550 were annotated.

BDST: 1417 HRS, JAN 24, 2014