Context: Recently, Union Minister of Science & Technology has launched “IndiGau’ launched “IndiGau", with an aim to conserve the country’s breeds with better characters and help towards doubling of farmers’ income by 2022.

About "IndiGau"

• “IndiGau’, India’s first Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) based chip for the conservation of pure varieties of indigenous cattle breeds like Gir, Kankrej, Sahiwal, Ongole etc. 
• Aim: The aim is to conserve the country’s breeds with better characters and help towards doubling of farmers’ income by 2022.
• Significance: It is purely indigenous and the largest cattle chip of the world with 11,496 markers and is a great example of self-reliant India / “ATMA NIRBHAR BHARAT”.
• Developed by: This indigenous chip was developed by  the scientists of the National Institute of Animal Biotechnology (NAIB), Hyderabad, an autonomous institution under the aegis of the Department of Biotechnology.

Other use

• DBT is looking forward to implementing this technology in the field with the help of other agencies like NDDB, DAHDF, ICAR etc. 
• To further the use of this chip in generating phenotypic and genotypic correlations, NIAB has entered into a collaborative agreement with National Dairy Development Board (NDDB).
• NIAB has also entered into an MoU with private industry to generate capability within India for designing and making our own SNP chips. 
• These may be very low-density SNP chips in the beginning and slowly this technology can be further strengthened for bigger chips, making India self-reliant in this field

Additional Information

About SNP Chip

• SNP stands for Single Nucleotide Polymorphism. It is a type of DNA microarray which is used to detect polymorphisms within a population.
• They are DNA microarrays that test genetic variation at many hundreds of thousands of specific locations across the genome.
• SNP chips have proven to be excellent for studying common genetic variation, which can be used to assess ancestry as well as predisposition to many complex multifactorial diseases.