PFI-RP: Accelerating the improvement of US cotton fiber quality

这一创新-研究伙伴关系（PFI-RP）项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力将是通过赋予上级质量，使美国棉花在世界市场上脱颖而出，恢复美国棉花的主导地位。作为世界上最重要的作物之一，棉花有很多机会参与价格具有竞争力的生物基产品行业。棉纤维的耐用性和强度的提高为取代合成纤维提供了机会，仅在美国每年就需要约2.3亿桶石油生产，但纤维质量的改善非常缓慢。该团队希望通过使用化学诱导的突变体来绕过棉花基因库中缺乏天然遗传变异的情况，从而加速纤维质量的改善。该团队希望通过识别和分离导致这种影响的遗传因素来解决长期存在的问题，即纤维质量的提高是以产量下降为代价的。即使是一个小的改进，杠杆超过约60亿美元的美国棉花作物的价值，估计约120亿美元/年的美国国内生产总值的影响，代表了一个重大的商业化opportunity.The拟议的项目建立在示范，我们可以获得棉花突变体与有用的纤维品质的改善，和组装的多个突变体的结果在高度优越的上级线。在这里，我们扩大池的上级线向“流水线”，也确定这些纤维品质性状对纤维产量的影响，确定诊断DNA标记，可用于加快这些基因的操作，并缩小基因本身的位置在基因组中的小间隔。这个项目将提供一个新的假设，即基因组区域的测试决定纤维品质的数量性状基因座（quantitative trait loci，QTL）不仅包括长期以来预期的单基因，而是几十个相互协调的基因因此，产量和纤维品质之间的反向关系可以通过在单基因中产生和鉴定突变来克服，所述突变以最小的干扰产量成分。 该项目将确定具有直接潜在商业价值的原型棉花“生产线”，以及正在进行的改进的“管道”，解决“红皇后”的挑战，我们将需要继续提高我们的纤维质量，随着商业标准的提高。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过评估使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查支持的搜索.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation - Research Partnerships (PFI-RP) project will be to restore the leading role of US cotton by conferring superior quality that distinguishes US cottons in world markets. One of the world's most important crops, cotton enjoys many opportunities to participate in a competitively priced bio-based products industry. Increased durability and strength of cotton fiber offers the opportunity to replace synthetic fibers that require ~230 million barrels of petroleum per year to produce in the USA alone - but fiber quality improvement has been extremely slow. The team expects to accelerate fiber quality improvement by using chemically-induced mutants to bypass the lack of natural genetic variation in the cotton gene pool. The team anticipates addressing the long-standing problem where fiber quality increases at the cost of decreasing yield by identifying and separating the genetic factors causing this effect. Even a small improvement, leveraged over the ~$6 billion value of the US cotton crop alone with an estimated aggregate influence of ~$120 billion/yr on the US gross domestic product, represents a major commercialization opportunity.The proposed project builds on the demonstration that we can obtain cotton mutants with useful improvements in fiber quality, and that assembly of multiple mutants results in highly superior lines. Here we broaden the pool of superior lines toward a 'pipeline', also determining the impact of these fiber quality traits on fiber yield, identify diagnostic DNA markers that can be used to expedite manipulation of these genes, and narrow the locations of the genes themselves to small intervals in the genome. This project will provide a test of the new hypothesis that genomic regions (quantitative trait loci, QTLs) that determine fiber quality include not merely single genes as long expected, but dozens of genes that function in coordination with one another -- and therefore that the inverse relationship between yield and fiber quality can be overcome by creating and identifying mutations in single genes that change quality traits with minimal disturbance to yield components. The project will identify prototype cotton 'lines' that are of immediate potential commercial value, as well as a 'pipeline' of ongoing improvements, addressing the 'Red Queen' challenge that we will need to continue to increase our fiber quality as commercial standards rise.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.