Improvement of cotton fibre quality through Marker Assisted Selection

The improvement of cotton fibre quality traits includes length, strength fineness, maturity and uniformity. Modernisation of textile industry naturally demands better quality fibres and accordingly cotton breeding has to be designed. Further, the immature fibre leads to costly yarn breakage during spinning and inefficient dye absorption. Hence, the fibre maturity has to be given due consideration.There is great scope in production and market of short staple cottons along with sustainability in the production of all other counts. Even though, the ample variability for the fibre quality traits is available in existing cultivated species and germplasm, the additional variability needs to be created to satisfy the above requirements. One of the ways to create such variability is the introgression of genes through wide species hybridization which has its own limitations. In the other hand, Molecular marker work with cotton has made a significant progress in the past decade and many attempts were made to identify microsatellite markers which would be of special use in molecular tagging of traits and MAS. Now a days, a comprehensive, high-density molecular map ofcotton were prepared utilizing SSR, RFLP and STS markers. The detection of relationships between genetic markers and QTL could be valuable for several reasons: it may give us fundamental knowledge about the number of QTL and the magnitude of gene effects influencing the traits, and it may allow to build more realistic models of phenotypic variation and of responses to selection. Moreover, the marker information can be used for identification and possibly for introgression of genes of interest from foreign species. Once the relationships between genetic markers and quantitative traits have been detected, and the marker alle le substitution effects have been estimated, it will be possible for us to use MAS for such traits to increase the selection response, and the accuracy of evaluation, or decrease the generation interval.