Targeting Yield Components and Fruiting Habit to Develop High-Yielding Cultivars.

The current cotton seed market in the US is almost exclusively transgenic cultivars with stacked herbicide and Bt traits. The role of public cotton breeders is to provide support to private industry and address regional issues that require long-term research investments in order to serve growers, seed companies and the general public. As such, the cotton breeding program at Texas A&M AgriLife Research in College Station, TX, has made yield enhancement a priority. High yield can be achieved through several mechanisms: insect resistance, cold tolerance, disease resistance, heat tolerance, drought tolerance, etc. A concentrated effort in this program has selected for phenotypes with a high lint percent and an aggressive fruiting habit. Lint percent generally shows a high heritability but negative linkage with fiber quality traits. Aggressive fruiting behavior is characterized by rapid accumulation of bolls, which is often associated with slightly delayed floral initiation. This trait can often exhibit a high genotype X environmental interaction.  Release of high yielding cultivars by Texas A&M AgriLife Research are important to minimize monopolization of the cottonseed industry and provide a delivery mechanism for projected value added traits developed by other public cotton research programs.