中国棉花研究进展

Chinese Science Bulletin

© 2007 SCIENCE IN CHINA PRESS

Springer

Chinese Science Bulletin | January 2007 | vol. 52 | no. 1 | 1-5

A R T I C L E S C

R O P B R E E D I N G A brief summary of major advances in cotton functional genomics and molecular breeding studies in China

Qin YongMei 1 & Zhu YuXian 1,2†

1 National Laboratory of Protein Engineering and Plant Genetic Engineering, College of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China;

2 National Center for Plant Gene Research (Beijing), Beijing100101, China

Cotton fibers, commonly known as cotton lint, are single-celled trichomes derived from epidermal lay-ers of cotton ovules. Despite of its importance in word trade, the molecular mechanisms of cotton fiber production is still poorly understood. Through transcriptome profiling, functional genomics, pro-teomics, metabolomics approaches as well as marker-assisted molecular breeding, scientists in China have made significant contributions in cotton research. Here, we briefly summarize major progresses made in Chinese laboratories, and discuss future directions and perspectives relative to the develop-ment of this unique crop plant.

Gossypium , cotton fiber, functional genomics, gene cloning, molecular breeding

Cotton accounts for about one half of the world’s natural fibers and is one of the most important economic crops in China. The Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China (MOST) initiated cotton functional genomics research through the High-Tech- nology Research and Development of China (“863”) in 1997 and through the “industrialization of transgenic plants” program in 1999. More recently, MOST initiated a project in the National Basic Research Program of China (973) to support the research aiming for the im-provement of both cotton lint production and fiber qual-ity. Indeed, among the 2469 research articles published in PubMed accessed journals in the last 5 years (2003—2007) that concentrated on cotton sciences, 340 were contributed by Chinese laboratories (Table 1). We thus hold a very strong second position only to United States of America which published 783 in the same period of time, in a close concert with the country being world’s number one cotton producer and manufacturer. Gossypium hirsutum and G . barbadense are natural cotton species that are allopolyploids. G . hirsutum , up-land cotton, accounts for about 92% to 95% of the an-nual cotton production in the world and generally grow Table 1 Ranking of countries by number of articles published in PuB-Med accessed journals in last 5 years (2003―2007) with cotton as the main subject

Country No. of publications USA 783

China 340 Japan 160 India 131 Australia 93 UK 83

France 51 Italy 44

up to 30―40 mm in length, about 15 μm in thickness at full maturity. G . barbadense , Sea Island cotton, repre-sents another 5% of cotton production. To fully under-stand the problem, our lab at Peking University per-formed a PCR-selected cDNA subtractive analysis using cDNAs prepared from upland cotton fiber as the testers and cDNAs from the fuzzless-lintless (fl ) mutant [1] as

Received September 0, 2007; accepted October 19, 2007

doi:

†Corresponding author (email: zhuyx@)

Supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2004CB117302)