*4.2. Sequence Retrieval and TCP Gene Identification*

To identify TCPs in *G. hirsutum*, multiple database searches were performed. The completed genome sequence and protein sequences of this species were downloaded from the CottonGen database (http://www.cottongen.org) and the Cotton Genome Project (http://cgp.genomics.org. cn/page/species/index.jsp). A local protein database was constructed using the protein sequences. The TCP proteins from *Arabidopsis* and rice were used as query sequences, and were collected from published literature and downloaded from The *Arabidopsis* Information Resource (TAIR release 10, http://www.arabidopsis.org) and the Rice Genome Annotation Project (ftp://ftp.plantbiology.msu. edu), respectively. The BLASTP (http://cgp.genomics.org.cn/) was used to do the BLAST search. The e-value was set at 1e-10. The candidate *TCP* genes were further aligned to remove redundant sequences. To verify the reliability of the initial results, all non-redundant candidate TCP sequences were analyzed to confirm the presence of the conserved TCP domain using the InterProScan database (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/) and the NCBI's CDD (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Structure/cdd/cdd. shtml). Based on the results, the sequences that did not include the TCP domain were eliminated.
