Abstract

Coton (Gossypium spp.) produces naturally soft, single-celled trichomes as iber on the seed coat supplying the main source of natural raw material for the textile industry. It is economically considered as one of the most leading cash crops in the world and evolutionarily very important as a model system for detailed scientiic investigations. Coton production is going through a big transition stage such as losing the market share in competition with the synthetic ibers, high popularity of Bt and herbicide resistance genes in coton cultivars, and the recent shift of iber demands to meet the standard fiber quality due to change of textile technologies to produce high superior quality of fibers in the global market. Recently, next-generation sequencing technologies through high-throughput sequencing at greatly reduced costs provided opportunities to sequence the diploid and tetraploid coton genomes. With the availability of large volume of literatures on molecular mapping, new genomic resources, characterization of coton genomes, discoveries of many novel genes, regulatory elements including small and microRNAs and new genetic tools such as gene silencing or gene editing technique for genome manipula- tion, this report atempted to provide the readers a comprehensive review on the recent advances of coton iber genomics research.