From the stockings decorating mantles to the new outfits in display windows calling to shoppers, cotton is woven into the fabric of the holiday season. For bioenergy researchers, however, fiber composition matters more than color and texture as each cotton strand is composed of more than two dozen coils of cellulose, a target biomass for next-generation biofuels.
In the December 20, 2012 edition of Nature, an international consortium of researchers from 31 institutions including a team from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) present a high-quality draft assembly of the simplest cotton (Gossypium raimondii) genome. Additionally, the team compared the genome from this ancestral species indigenous to the Americas to several other sets of cotton data contributed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The results have allowed the researchers to trace the evolution of cotton over millions of years from wild varieties to the domesticated species that are now associated with textile production.
Growing, processing and manufacturing cotton is a major global industry. In the United States, more than 200,000 domestic jobs are related to cotton production and processing, with an aggregate influence of about $35 billion on the annual U.S. gross domestic product. The cotton fiber grown is valued at about $6 billion per year, with cottonseed oil and meal byproducts worth nearly another $1 billion. U.S. textile mills convert much of the cotton processed annually into apparel.
The cotton plants seen growing in typical fields in the U.S. are polyploids, hybrids of two types of cotton (cotton A and cotton D) with multiple copies of their genomes or chromosome sets. As one of the closest extant relatives of the tetraploid cotton genome (containing four sets of chromosomes), the diploid G. raimondii was selected for sequencing in part because it has a smaller genome and fewer repetitive elements th
'/>"/>
| Contact: David Gilbert degilbert@lbl.gov DOE/Joint Genome Institute Source:Eurekalert |
Related biology news :
1. Lets get moving: Unraveling how locomotion starts
2. Unraveling biological networks
3. ORNL microscopy yields first proof of ferroelectricity in simplest amino acid
4. Texas cotton getting a genetic tune-up
5. Chinese scientists successfully crack the genome of diploid cotton
6. Ancient Egyptian cotton unveils secrets of domesticated crop evolution
7. CNIO researchers develop new databases for understanding the human genome
8. Whats in a genome?
9. Your Christmas tree and its genome have remained very much the same over the last 100 million years
10. Combining two genome analysis approaches supports immune system contribution to autism
11. Study finds prioritizing rather than canvassing entire plant genome may lead to improved crops
| Copyright © 2003-2012 Bio-Medicine. All rights reserved. ABOUT | CONTACT US | DISCLAIMER | PRIVACY POLICY | TERMS AND CONDITIONS |  |