A rapid measurement for cotton breeders of maturity and fineness from developing and mature fibers

The Cottonscope simultaneously measures a cotton fiber’s maturity and fineness using a small amount of fiber sample. A program of testing was devised to establish the potential and capabilities of the Cottonscope to rapidly and accurately measure maturity and fineness of small quantities of near-isogenic cotton lines (NILs), and to examine the use of the Cottonscope maturity distributions for breeder applications. Cottonscope measurements were performed on mature and immature fibers of varying days post-anthesis (DPA) from two pairs of NILs (MD 52ne versus MD 90ne; TM-1 versus the low maturity im). The patterns of cotton maturity and fineness during cotton fiber development of each NIL measured by the Cottonscope were compared to those measured by more conventional methods (e.g. the Advanced Fiber Information System (AFIS), an older and currently more widely used method). The Cottonscope maturity and fineness results were much more responsive to increasing DPA than the AFIS results, and the patterns of Cottonscope maturity values were consistent with those of the Fibronaire micronaire. Comparisons of the Cottonscope maturity distributions among the NILs demonstrated that the maturity distribution for im was very different and exhibited much lower maturity values compared to the distributions of other lines. The results demonstrated that the Cottonscope is an efficient instrument for cotton breeders to monitor fiber maturity and fineness of developing and mature cotton fibers.