Preservinga racing camel's genome.

Ask a camel owner in the Emirates about a champion and the conversation will quickly turn to its mother, its grandmother and the family that bred it. Racing and beauty camels are valued not only for what they do, but for what they carry. A great dam may shape a herd for decades; a sire's line may be sought after long after his own racing days are over. The genome is the inheritance.

This is also what makes loss so costly. A camel's working life is finite. Injuries happen on the track. Animals age, fall ill, or die unexpectedly. Traditional breeding can carry a line forward, but only if the animal is able to breed, and only at the pace of camel reproduction – a single calf roughly every two years. Preservation offers a different kind of continuity: the genome itself, kept alive in a vial, independent of the animal's health or age.

For camels, the biopsy almost always happens where the animal lives. Moving a valuable racing camel is stressful and carries its own risks, so our mobile laboratory comes to the farm, the racing yard or the breeding centre. The animal is calmly restrained by its handlers, a small area of skin – often behind the ear or on the neck – is cleaned and numbed with local anaesthetic, and a veterinarian takes a punch sample a few millimetres across. The wound is closed with a stitch. The whole procedure takes minutes.

The sample goes straight into chilled transport medium in a sealed, barcoded tube. On the mobile laboratory it can be processed immediately, or kept cool for the journey to Abu Dhabi. It is in culture the same day. Owners who prefer their own veterinarian to take the sample receive a sealed kit and instructions; the result is the same.

Camel fibroblasts grow much as those of other mammals: out of the tissue fragment in the first days, across the dish within two weeks, then into larger flasks. We freeze them at low passage, in twelve vials, half in Abu Dhabi and half in the Bahrain mirror. Every line is tested for contamination and given a DNA identity profile before it is certified. One vial is thawed and counted to confirm the cells survive freezing.

The owner receives a growth record – photographs and measurements of the line from explant to freezing – together with an engraved vault certificate and an entry in the registry. The certificate records both cities that hold the line.

The first and most common use of a banked camel line is parentage and lineage testing. Because the line carries the animal's complete genome, it can be compared with the samples of a presumed sire and dam at any time, to confirm pedigree for registration, sale or breeding. This is well-established science. Broader ancestry estimates are possible too, but reference data for camels is still limited, and our reports say so.

The second use is regenerative. Racing camels suffer tendon and joint injuries much as racehorses do. A veterinarian may prescribe stem cells prepared from the camel's own tissue, and a banked line can shorten the time needed to prepare them. As with every regenerative treatment, outcomes vary, and availability depends on local veterinary regulation.

The third use is cloning. The first cloned camel, a female named Injaz, was born in Dubai in 2009 from the cells of an adult camel. Since then, the Gulf has become the world centre for camel cloning, and many genetic twins of racing and beauty champions have been born.¹

A cloned camel is a genetic twin of its donor – a new calf, born to a surrogate dam, carrying the same nuclear DNA. It is not a copy of the champion's career. Racing performance depends on training, nutrition, handling and temperament as well as on genes, and a genetic twin must be raised and trained like any other young camel. Some competitions admit cloned camels and some do not; owners should check the rules that matter to them.

Camel gestation lasts about thirteen months, so a cloning programme typically runs eighteen to thirty months from an established line to birth. Not every embryo transfer leads to pregnancy, and not every pregnancy goes to term. We follow pregnancies by ultrasound and tell owners at every stage what has happened. Surrogate dams are cared for by our veterinary team throughout, and we keep welfare records that clients may see.

Banking a camel's cells costs $5,000 in the UAE and $6,500 elsewhere in the GCC; cloning starts from $100,000 from a banked line. More detail is on Camels and Heritage.