The Tale of Cotton Plant: From Wild Type to Domestication, Leading to Its Improvement by Genetic Transformation

Cotton is considered as a major cash crop of the world. It earns huge foreign exchange by its valuable products; fiber, lint, cotton seed oil, hull and a lot more. Being an important fiber crop, it earns huge foreign exchange by contributing to textile and seed oil industry. This review summarizes cotton biology, its diversity and domestication, genome assembly, constraints in its production and methods to improve cotton plant to fulfill the need of textile and oil industry. But cotton is facing enormous biotic and abiotic stresses with insect pests being most prominent. Massive destruction caused by insects needs to be controlled for maintaining fruitful cotton crop production. Conventional breeding approaches are limited to improving single trait and integrate stable genes within plant genome in approximately 7 - 8 years. Improved biotechnological procedures have paved new pathways to target genes specifically and improve cotton germplasm in lesser time than conventional breeding.