REVIEW & INTERPRETATION
Zhao Junjie, Ren Zhongying, Zhang Zhiqiang, Zhang Fei, Liu Yangai, He Kunlun, Guo Jinfeng, Zhou Xiaojian, Zhang Wensheng, Wang Haijuan, Li Wei, Yang Daigang
Cotton is an important cash crop and main raw materials for textile industry, which plays a critical role in economic development of China. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, traditional breeding technology has made a great contribution to improve cotton production. With the advancement of sequencing technology, multi-omics research, and gene editing techniques, precise and efficient molecular design breeding has become an inevitable direction for cotton breeding. This review summarizes the present status of cotton production, the history of breeding development, and the achievements of molecular design breeding in genomic research, fiber development, disease resistance and mining of the molecular module of important traits, and proposes directions and path for the future cotton breeding.