Application of Cottonscope for Determining Fiber Maturity and Fineness of an Upland Cotton Genetic Population.

Maturity and fineness are two major properties estimating micro-scaled cotton fiber thickness. Due to their important roles on lint yield, fiber quality, and yarn performance, textile industry has tried to improve accuracy and efficiency of measuring degree of cotton fiber thickness. A recent development of Cottonscope^® using advanced technologies including snippet, polarized microscopy, and image analysis has improved ways of quantitatively assessing maturity and fineness from reference cotton materials composed of homogenous fibers. However, cotton geneticists and breeders have not adapted the new technology yet since it has not been tested with genetic materials composed of a large number fiber samples with high levels of variations within a sample and among replicates. Thus, we have tested Cottonscope with a genetic population composed of two biological replicates of 550 recombinant inbred lines, and compared the results with those measured by a conventional Advanced Fiber Information System (AFIS) that uses an electro-optical technology. We will present strength, weakness, and potentials of using Cottonscope for phenotyping genetic materials that are mostly composed of inhomogeneous and variant fibers.