Molecular Insights into Cotton Fiber Gene Regulation

Dear Colleagues,

Cotton is an irreplaceable economic crop domesticated by human beings for its extremely elongated fibers, with a central role in the world’s textile industry. Since the quality of cotton fiber cells directly determines its economic value, enhancing fiber quality is always the primary task in cotton breeding practices. In recent years, many fiber quality-related genes, QTLs and biochemical pathways have been identified and proposed. For example, several major QTLs were found to be associated with fiber length and quality improvement via cotton genome sequencing projects. Moreover, a lack of favorable allelic diversity in most cotton cultivars, which is recognized as the bottleneck for fiber quality enhancement, was overcome by introgression of exotic donors, i.e., from members of other Gossypium genera. In the future, scientists may incorporate more diploid genes or loci to improve the quality of Upland cotton fibers. This Special Issue of Plants will focus on and highlight the functional regulatory mechanisms that underlie fiber cell elongation, the evolution of genes involved in the specific linear cell growth mode, as well as control of cell wall biosynthesis and other related aspects.

Prof. Dr. Yuxian Zhu
Prof. Dr. Fuguang Li
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Plants is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• cotton fiber
• plant hormone
• elongation
• cell wall growth
• molecular regulation
• QTLs
• introgression