Evaluation of Cotton Fibers Propensity to Break in F3 Breeding Lines

Within-sample fiber length variation is an important property for cotton yarn production. Genetic, environmental, and processing factors affect this property. Fiber breakage is a phenomenon that can decrease fiber length uniformity. As within-sample uniformity decreases, the strength and evenness of the yarn produced will decrease. The amount of mechanical stress applied to fibers during ginning in a breeding program is smaller than under commercial settings. This stress differential could result in a biased assessment of the propensity to break in a research setting. An experiment was performed to quantify fiber breakage of a set of F3 lines in two crop years. Fiber length distributions were acquired for cotton samples before and after one passage through a lint cleaner machine to mechanically stress the fibers. We used Squared Euclidian distances to measure changes in fiber length distributions imparted by this mechanical processing procedure. High variability among F3 lines was observed for propensity to break. Applying this procedure in breeding programs could lead to improvements for fiber length uniformity.