Abstract
BackgroundCotton fiber is the world's leading natural fiber used in the manufacture of textiles. Gossypium is also the model plant in the study of polyploidization, evolution, cell elongation, cell wall development, and cellulose biosynthesis. G. barbadense L. is an ideal candidate for providing new genetic variations useful to improve fiber quality for its superior properties. However, little is known about fiber development mechanisms of G. barbadense and only a few molecular resources are available in GenBank.Methodology and Principal FindingsIn total, 10,979 high-quality expressed sequence tags (ESTs) were generated from a normalized fiber cDNA library of G. barbadense. The ESTs were clustered and assembled into 5852 unigenes, consisting of 1492 contigs and 4360 singletons. The blastx result showed 2165 unigenes with significant similarity to known genes and 2687 unigenes with significant similarity to genes of predicted proteins. Functional classification revealed that unigenes were abundant in the functions of binding, catalytic activity, and metabolic pathways of carbohydrate, amino acid, energy, and lipids. The function motif/domain-related cytoskeleton and redox homeostasis were enriched. Among the 5852 unigenes, 282 and 736 unigenes were identified as potential cell wall biosynthesis and transcription factors, respectively. Furthermore, the relationships among cotton species or between cotton and other model plant systems were analyzed. Some putative species-specific unigenes of G. barbadense were highlighted.Conclusions/SignificanceThe ESTs generated in this study are from the first large-scale EST project for G. barbadense and significantly enhance the number of G. barbadense ESTs in public databases. This knowledge will contribute to cotton improvements by studying fiber development mechanisms of G. barbadense, establishing a breeding program using marker-assisted selection, and discovering candidate genes related to important agronomic traits of cotton through oligonucleotide array. Our work will also provide important resources for comparative genomics, polyploidization, and genome evolution among Gossypium species.
Highlights
Cotton is one of the most important economic crops that provides prevalent natural fiber for the textile industry
The enlargement of the G. barbadense expressed sequence tags (ESTs) database is a good supplement for fiber development work in cotton
In Gossypium, the highest number of ESTs in the NCBI GenBank was from G. hirsutum
Summary
Cotton is one of the most important economic crops that provides prevalent natural fiber for the textile industry. PCW begins to synthesize at the surface area of the fiber cell. This is followed by the synthesis of SCW through the massive deposition of cellulose at 15–40 dpa. Cotton fiber contains about 89% cellulose as is approximately 15 mm in thickness. Cotton fiber is an excellent model system for studying plant cell elongation, cell wall development, and cellulose biosynthesis [2]. Gossypium is the model plant in the study of polyploidization, evolution, cell elongation, cell wall development, and cellulose biosynthesis. Little is known about fiber development mechanisms of G. barbadense and only a few molecular resources are available in GenBank
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