Leveraging Genomics and Phenomics to Unravel Stress-Adaptive Traits in Cotton

Sustainable production of cotton is threatened by increasingly variable weather patterns and fierce competition for fresh water resources. To help combat these challenges, an understanding of the physiological processes that occur in response to high heat and water deficit, and the genetics controlling them, is needed as these abiotic stresses become more common in cotton producing regions. Recent technological developments, including field-based high-throughput phenotyping, –omics data technologies, and new analyses, offer the potential to illuminate the relationship between phenotype and genotype. Building on these multidimensional data sets and leveraging them to their fullest, ecophysiological models can be used to provide a mechanistic connection between environmental parameters and phenotype development to shed light on the complexities of phenotypic plasticity. Taken together, these recent advances are helping scientists unravel the link between genes and the environment for the production of stress resilient cotton cultivars. This presentation will provide an overview of recent progress on this front while demonstrating how new types of data can provide further insight into drought response under field conditions like those which cotton producers experience.