Genomic Prediction of U.S. Obsolete Cultivar Collection for Fiber Quality Traits

US cotton breeding efforts must keep pace with current demands in cotton fiber quality if US cotton is to remain competitive in the global textile market. These demands come from the improvement of spinning technologies which require longer and stronger cotton fiber properties. Current phenotyping advancements, such as High Volume Instrumentation (HVI) and Advanced Fiber Information System (AFIS), allow breeders to detect superior fiber quality. However, these technologies are recent in the scope of over a hundred years of breeding efforts in US cotton. To tap into potentially overlooked sources of fiber quality alleles, a training population was built from selected cultivars and germplasm lines from the U.S cotton obsolete variety collection, and other material with known fiber quality alleles. Population structure and genetic diversity analysis was performed on this population to identify potential nesting sources of alleles within structure caused by linkage disequilibrium. A model was built using this population to most effectively predict phenotype from genotypic data within the U.S cotton obsolete variety collection.