| Abstract: | Abstract Quality of cotton can be defined through seed or fiber properties, but is most often associated with fiber properties that influence processing into yarn and textile products. Global competition in the production and consumption of cotton fiber combined with technological evolution of yarn manufacturing has spurred renewed efforts to enhance cotton fiber quality. Cotton fiber quality can be improved through genetics, crop management, and postharvest processing. Knowledge of the effects of fiber properties on processing and their inheritance, relationships, and environmental influences is necessary to formulate improvement strategies. Breeding to improve fiber quality has traditionally focused on enhancing measures of the longest fibers or fiber strength for ring yarn manufacturing systems. With the technological evolution of yarn manufacturing from solely ring-based spinning to predominately rotor and potentially in the near future air-jet spinning, needs for fiber profiles have been revised for these spinning systems. Successful rotor spinning requires high fiber strength for all yarn counts, along with fiber fineness for fine count yarns. The even more productive air-jet spinning requires a minimum, but uniform fiber length, fiber fineness, and to a lesser extent strong fiber. In contrast, ring spinning requires a minimum fiber length, fiber strength, and to a lesser extent fiber fineness. Breeders do not conduct direct selection for yarn properties because of impracti-calities, thus they select for fiber properties that influence processing, so-called indirect selection. The inherent environmentally induced variability in fiber properties presents challenges to enhance them through breeding or biotechnological approaches. Because variability in fiber properties is problematic to fiber processing, future-breeding and biotechnological approaches should simultaneously focus on enhancing fiber properties and reducing variation. This paper will review strategies to enhance fiber profiles through genetic approaches while ameliorating their variation. |
