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

这一创新-研究伙伴关系(PFI-RP)项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力将是通过赋予美国棉花在世界市场上的卓越质量来恢复美国棉花的领先地位。作为世界上最重要的农作物之一，棉花有很多机会参与价格具有竞争力的生物产品行业。棉纤维耐用性和强度的提高为取代仅在美国就需要每年生产约2.3亿桶石油的合成纤维提供了机会，但纤维质量的改善一直非常缓慢。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自然遗传变异的情况，来加速纤维质量的改进。该团队预计将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，即纤维质量增加，但代价是产量下降。即使是一个很小的改进，仅利用美国棉花收成价值约60亿美元，估计对美国国内生产总值的总影响约为每年约1200亿美元，也代表着一个重大的商业化机会。拟议的项目建立在以下证明的基础上：我们可以获得纤维质量得到有效改善的棉花突变体，而多个突变体的组装可以产生非常优越的品系。在这里，我们扩大了优良品系的池，走向一条‘管道’，还确定了这些纤维品质性状对纤维产量的影响，确定了可用于加快对这些基因的操纵的诊断DNA标记，并将基因本身的位置缩小到基因组中的小区间。该项目将对新的假设进行检验，即决定纤维品质的基因组区域(数量性状基因座，QTL)不仅包括人们期待已久的单个基因，还包括数十个相互协调发挥作用的基因--因此，可以通过在单个基因中创造和识别突变来克服产量和纤维品质之间的反向关系，这些基因可以在对产量构成因素的干扰最小的情况下改变品质性状。该项目将确定具有直接潜在商业价值的原型棉花“线”，以及正在进行的改进的“管道”，以应对“红皇后”挑战，即随着商业标准的提高，我们将需要继续提高我们的纤维质量。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.