Salinity stress is a major abiotic factor that affects crop output, and as a pioneer crop in saline and alkaline land, salt tolerance study of cotton is particularly important. In our experiment, four salt-tolerance varieties with different salt tolerance indexes including CRI35 (65.04%), Kanghuanwei164 (56.19%), Zhong9807 (55.20%) and CRI44 (50.50%), as well as four salt-sensitive cotton varie...

The CONSTANS/FLOWERING LOCUS T (CO/FT) regulon plays a central role in the control of flowering time in photoperiod-sensitive plants. Flowering time in wild cotton (Gossypium spp.) has strict photoperiod sensitivity, but domesticated cotton is day-neutral. Information on the molecular characterization of the CO and CO-like (COL) genes in cotton is very limited. In this study, we identified 42 C...

Shoot branching, i.e., the timing and position of shoot growth, determines to a large extend the pattern of plant architecture, and is the result of the integration of a plant's genetic background and environmental cues. Many genes that are involved in the formation and outgrowth of axillary buds have been cloned, but the exact mechanism is still unclear. Branching pattern is an important agron...

The formation of axillary meristems in leaf axils is a prerequisite for the development of lateral shoots, which largely contribute to plant architecture. Several transcription factor-encoding genes, including CUC3, RAX, LAS, LOF1, and ROX, have been cloned by screening for axillary meristem mutants in Arabidopsis thaliana. These genes will facilitate our understanding of the mechanisms underly...

WRKY transcription factors play important roles in plant defense, stress response, leaf senescence, and plant growth and development. Previous studies have revealed the important roles of the group IIa GhWRKY genes in cotton. To comprehensively analyze the group IIa GhWRKY genes in upland cotton, we identified 15 candidate group IIa GhWRKY genes in the Gossypium hirsutum genome. The phylogeneti...

Segregating populations were developed to evaluate the inheritance of the fuzzless seed phenotypes in upland cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.). Accession 143 of the Mississippi Obsolete Variety Collection (MOVC) has a fuzzless seed phenotype. This line carries the n(2) locus which is recessive to the seed fuzz phenotype. Data from the F(2), BC(1)F(1), F(2:3), and BC(1)F(2) populations of DP 5690 x...

An RNA-Seq experiment was performed using field grown well-watered and naturally rain fed cotton plants to identify differentially expressed transcripts under water-deficit stress. Our work constitutes the first application of the newly published diploid D5 Gossypium raimondii sequence in the study of tetraploid AD1 upland cotton RNA-seq transcriptome analysis. A total of 1,530 transcripts were...

Cotton fiber quality is defined by several traits, which are affected by genotype×environment interaction (GEI). The objectives of this work were to study GEI of fiber traits, the repeatability and the effect of the size of testing environments in detecting cultivar genetic differences by High Volume Instrument (HVI), and the usefulness of two GEI derived stability indices, σ2i and GGE Instabil...