Bidar: The Indian Council for Agriculture Research (ICAR) will set up a chain of state-of-the-art bio-safety level 3 and level 4 laboratories for research and development activities and creating awareness about various diseases and preventing them, ICAR Director-General Mangal Rai said here on Wednesday.

He was delivering the first convocation address of Karnataka Veterinary, Animal and Fisheries Sciences University.

India had some of the best laboratories in the world. They helped India to successfully diagnose and control bird flu in February last. The High Security Animal Disease Laboratory of the ICAR had developed a vaccine in a record time of five months to tackle bird flu.

With successful control of the disease, pre-outbreak disease free status was declared. India was one of the few countries to be credited with eradicating the disease, Dr. Rai said.

The ICAR would also help research and development activities in animal genetics. Experiments in leading laboratories in the world had proved that human genes could be transferred into eggs and the resultant organism could be used to treat cancer. Scientists in Australia had succeeded in developing gene-silencing technology where a gene was switched off to control diseases and pests, or develop new breeds, and produce designer livestock products.

The ICAR would support research in similar fields in various universities, he said.

Development of animal husbandry was one of the proven methods to usher in rural prosperity, he said.

Veterinarians should focus on breed improvement, feed and fodder security and animal health. That would surely lead to all round development, he said.

Vice-Chancellor R.N. Sreenivas Gowda said that the university had made great strides in biotechnology research.

Presenting a report, he said the first-ever recombinant protein vaccine for motile aeromonas septicemia in fish had been developed by the Fisheries College in Mangalore.

The college was the first in the world to demonstrate the efficacy of a bio-film vaccine for motile aeromonads that could be given orally to fish.

To help increase fish exports, the university had developed a kit to detect antibiotic residues in fish. Alternatives for antibiotics had been developed using DNA technology. Several DNA micro satellite markers had been developed for differentiating fresh water prawns. The gene coding for lysozyme in black tiger shrimp, Penaeus Monodon, had been cloned, sequenced, and expressed. Two related innovations had been patented.

Scientists had developed diagnostic kits for fish borne trematode and transmission of human pathogenic viruses through filter feeding shellfish, using molecular techniques, Dr. Gowda said.

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