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

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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.