Background:
Poultry farming has been a lucrative enterprise as benefit-cost ratio is relatively higher than other livestock farming. Poultry farming is practiced mostly in two ways, intensive type farming and backyard farming. In both the farming system, sufficient numbers of male and females birds are required to regenerate future generation. In layer farming, more number of female birds are required as they lay eggs while required numbers of male birds are needed to produce next generation. In broiler farming, both male and females are equally important but the most desire is to have more male chicks as the weight of male birds are higher than their female counter parts. In layer farming, too many male chicks are not desired and hence are culled on day-old or early age to minimize feed and other managemental costs. Therefore, chicks are needed to be sexed at early age and required numbers of chicks of specific sexes are kept in the farm while remaining are discarded. In birds, gonads are not visible from outside and hence, gender determination is a grave problem in early age of birds, particularly when other related characters are mostly nonexpressed. Hence, a kit has been developed to determine gender at early and adult age in birds. Further, in zoo birds, gender determination is very much essential to regenerate the wild or exotic birds of high value so that the subsequent generation is maintained and solve the problem of extinction. In birds, many procedures are available to determine gender, but, each technique does have its own limitation and advantages. All the methods are not so perfect in all aspects especially type of tissues, tissue collection procedure, complicacy of the method, accuracy, time requirement, age of sexing and economic aspect. To nullify these limitations, our technique of gender determination in very early age, sometimes at day old stage does have added advantages.:
Technology Details:
A kit including method has been developed to determine gender in chicks as well as adult birds of avian species. The method can be applied in day old chicks as well as adult birds and within 3-4 hours of time, gender of the birds can be determined. This method needs tissues like feathers, blood or any other tissues of the birds and can be used directly for gender determination without isolating nucleic acid from the tissues. This method is a single tube method. It is very simple and rapid. The method can be employed at any age right from day old to adult stage. This method is applicable for sex determination in all sorts of birds where female chromosome pattern is ZW type and male is ZZ type. This method is not breed specific or age specific.:
The technology has been patented (Patent No. 309612).