Read the
magazine
story to find out more.
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ARS is breeding Pima cotton, one of the most
desirable types of cotton, so it will not abort cotton bolls due to heat
stress. Click the image for more information about it.
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Breeding Cotton to Beat the Heat
By Laura
McGinnis
February 5, 2008 People expect a lot from cotton.
Consumers want durable, comfortable fabrics. Producers want
easy-to-manufacture textiles. And growers want hardy, thriving plants. Uniting
these traits is the goal of Agricultural Research Service (ARS) cotton breeders at the
U.S.
Arid-Land Agricultural Research Center in Maricopa, Ariz.
Plant geneticist
Richard
Percy, now with the
ARS
Southern Plains Agricultural Research Center in College Station, Texas, has
bred new cotton lines with qualities to please growers, fabric manufacturers
and consumers.
Pimaan extra-long-staple cottonproduces long, strong fibers that
are suitable for high- quality products such as luxury bed sheets and sewing
thread. But pima plants have been historically susceptible to heat. They start
exhibiting symptoms of heat stress when their leaf canopy temperaturethe
temperature of a plant itself, as opposed to the air around itreaches
about 82 degrees Fahrenheit.
During the past five decades, Percy and his colleagues have bred and
released heat-tolerant and heat-avoidant pima lines, which the commercial seed
industry has used to create new varieties that can withstand extreme
temperatures.
In 2003, Cotton Incorporated offered
to partner with Percy and ARS to improve heat tolerance and fiber quality in
upland cotton, the species that makes up the majority of the U.S. cotton crop.
To ensure that the new cotton lines would be productive and competitive
throughout the Cotton Belt, Percy enlisted ARS and university scientists in
Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana and California in an across-the-cotton-belt
breeding and evaluation program.
In 2006, as a result of their collaboration, ARS and Cotton Incorporated
released three upland cotton lines with superior fiber quality and heat
tolerance. Those lines have been picked up by about two dozen commercial seed
companies and breeders for further development.
Read
more about this research in the February 2008 issue of Agricultural
Research magazine.
ARS is the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's chief in-house scientific research agency.