Molecular Insights into Cotton Fiber Gene Regulation

Dear Colleagues,

Cotton is an irreplaceable economic crop domesticated by human beings for its extremely elongated fibers, with a central role in the world’s textile industry. Since the quality of cotton fiber cells directly determines its economic value, enhancing fiber quality is always the primary task in cotton breeding practices. In recent years, many fiber quality-related genes, QTLs and biochemical pathways have been identified and proposed. For example, several major QTLs were found to be associated with fiber length and quality improvement via cotton genome sequencing projects. Moreover, a lack of favorable allelic diversity in most cotton cultivars, which is recognized as the bottleneck for fiber quality enhancement, was overcome by introgression of exotic donors, i.e., from members of other Gossypium genera. In the future, scientists may incorporate more diploid genes or loci to improve the quality of Upland cotton fibers. This Special Issue of Plants will focus on and highlight the functional regulatory mechanisms that underlie fiber cell elongation, the evolution of genes involved in the specific linear cell growth mode, as well as control of cell wall biosynthesis and other related aspects.

Prof. Dr. Yuxian Zhu
Prof. Dr. Fuguang Li
Guest Editors

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