Thirty volunteer subjects were exposed to controlled amounts of respirable dust generated by the carding of cotton in an experimental cardroom. Eighteen exposures each lasting six hours were performed while carding unwashed and washed cottons from the three major growing regions of the United States. Elutriated dust was analysed gravimetrically and was comparable (0.59 mg/m3 +/- 0.04) for all e...

Levels of genetic diversity within and among populations and species are shaped by both external (population-level) and internal (genomic and genic) evolutionary forces. To address the effect of internal pressures, we estimated nucleotide diversity for a pair of homoeologous Adh loci in an allotetraploid species, Gossypium hirsutum. These data represent the first such estimates for a pair of ho...

We assessed the effects of red imported fire ants (Solenopsis invicta; hereafter fire ant) on the foraging of hispid cotton rats (Sigmodon hispidus). We used a manipulative experiment, placing resource patches with a known amount of millet seed within areas with reduced (RIFA [-]) or ambient (RIFA [+]) numbers of fire ants. We measured giving up densities (the amount of food left within each pa...

The formation of allopolyploid cotton precipitated a rapid diversification and colonization of dry coastal American tropical and subtropical regions. Previous phylogenetic analyses, combined with molecular divergence analyses, have offered a temporal framework for this radiation, but provide only weak support for some of the resolved branches. Moreover, these earlier analyses did not include th...

Bollgard cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) containing the CryIAc endotoxin of Bacillus thuringiensis Berliner became commercially available to cotton producers in 1996. Bollgard cultivars since that time have provided excellent control of the tobacco budworm, Heliothis virescens F., for growers in Arkansas. Control of bollworm, Helicoverpa zea (Boddie), and other lepidopterous pests has been less ...

Nuclear-encoded genes exist in families of various sizes. To further our understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of nuclear gene families we present a characterization of the structure and evolution of the alcohol dehydrogenase (Adh) gene family in diploid and tetraploid members of the cotton genus (Gossypium, Malvaceae). A PCR-based approach was employed to isolate and sequence multiple Adh...

The goal of the current study was to assess possibility interspecific hybridization for transfer jassid-resistant genes from two wild cotton species Gossypium armourianum (Kearney (2n=2x=26) D2A) and Gossypium gossypoides (Standley (2n=2x= 26) D6) into genotypes cultivated hirsutum. demonstrated that seeds were successfully produced crosses between G. hirsutum armourianum using t...

MicroRNAs are ubiquitous in plant genomes but vary greatly in their abundance within and conservation among plant lineages. To gain insight into the evolutionary birth/death dynamics of microRNA families, we sequenced small RNA and 5'-end PARE libraries generated from two closely related species of Gossypium. Here, we demonstrate that 33 microRNA families, with similar copy numbers and average ...