Cotton being harvested. In the United States, 95 percent of the cotton grown is Gossypium hirsutum, known as Upland cotton. (Cotton Inc)

Cotton being harvested. In the United States, 95 percent of the cotton grown is Gossypium hirsutum, known as Upland cotton. (Cotton Inc.)

A multi-institutional team including JGI researchers has now sequenced and assembled the genomes of the five major cotton lineages. Senior authors of the paper published April 20, 2020 in Nature Genetics include Jane Grimwood and Jeremy Schmutz of JGI’s Plant Program, both faculty investigators at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology.

“The goal has been for all this new cotton work, and even the original cotton project was to try to bring in molecular methods of breeding into cotton,” said Schmutz, who heads JGI’s Plant Program. The high quality reference genomes of all five cotton lineages are available for comparative analysis on JGI’s plant data portal Phytozome 

Go here to read the full story on the JGI website.