【Smart Farmers】A little romance! Scientists develop pink cotton

Recently, the cotton molecular genetic improvement innovation team of the Cotton Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences successfully enriched betalain in cotton fibers and created pink cotton fibers, providing a new idea for using genetic engineering methods to cultivate multi-type colored fiber cotton. The relevant research results were published online in the Plant Biotechnology Journal.

Cotton textile processing requires a lot of chemical dyes, which pollute the environment and affect health. Creating different types of colored fiber cotton through genetic engineering can effectively reduce the use of chemical dyes. Existing colored cotton is mainly brown and green cotton, with relatively single colors, which is difficult to meet people's colorful life needs.

The study first optimized the codons of three key genes related to betalain synthesis, and obtained a new cotton material rich in betalain using the cotton variety "China Cotton Research Institute 49" as the receptor. Driven by a constitutive promoter, cotton fibers and other tissues showed a pink phenotype. Driven by a fiber-specific promoter, only cotton fibers were pink. The content of betalain in mature fibers decreases with the lysis of vacuoles, causing the color to become lighter. In the next step, researchers will conduct further research on the mechanism of betalain deposition without fading. This study is the first to introduce betalain into cotton and stably express it. It is a preliminary exploration of synthetic biology research using cotton as a chassis organism, laying the foundation for the creation of new types of colored cotton.

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Science and Technology Innovation Project of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and the Yazhou Bay Seed Laboratory's Challenge Project.

Popularizing Science in China to Benefit Farmers

Academic Support

Ge Xiaoyang, Cotton Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences

Production

Guangming Online Science Department

reporter

Song Yajuan