Lu 05h9 pioneered Cotton Marker breeding in China

Recently, a new safflower marked insect-resistant hybrid cotton variety Lu 05H9 selected by the Cotton Center of Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences has been examined and approved by the National crop Variety approval Committee. The safflower mark is like putting an anti-counterfeiting label on the transgenic insect-resistant hybrid cotton. This variety has created a precedent of cotton safflower trait marker breeding in China, and it is also the first case in the world.

According to the researcher Wang Liuming of variety breeding, Lu 05H9 safflower marker insect-resistant cotton was bred by transferring the HB safflower character of wild Bick cotton to cultivated insect-resistant hybrid cotton after 12 years. The new variety has pink flowers with large purple base spots at the bottom of the petals. In full bloom, the cotton field is pink and there are no other miscellaneous flowers. At present, other cotton varieties planted in China have milky white or light yellow flowers, which turn red only after pollination, and there is no basal spot or base spot is not obvious, so no matter from a single plant or cotton field, there will be a mixture of red and white flowers. The phenomenon of safflower marks makes it easy to distinguish transgenic hybrid cotton with this marker from ordinary cotton, and gives farmers the right to identify the authenticity of hybrid cotton, which is more conducive to standardizing market order and protecting the interests of farmers.

Like most crops, cotton has obvious heterosis. However, with the development of cotton market, the variety, disorder and miscellaneous problems of hybrid cotton have become increasingly prominent, and the purity and quality of hybrid cotton is difficult to be effectively controlled. Because the cotton plant has the habit of unlimited growth, it is difficult to distinguish between different varieties in the population state, the counterfeiting behavior of changing packages and impersonating hybrid cotton and mixing F2 seeds in F1 generation of hybrid cotton occurs from time to time, which not only directly harms the interests of cotton farmers, but also makes the seed character of hybrid cotton can not be fully shown in large-scale production, thus reducing its due production level and affecting the healthy development of hybrid cotton industry. Lu 05H9 used Carthamus tinctorius as a marker character to study the hybrids of highly dominant varieties in which both female and male parents carried Bt insecticidal genes, which provided a convenient and quick technical way for the detection and control of seed purity of hybrid F1, and became an important breakthrough in hybrid cotton breeding in the Yellow River basin.

It is understood that in the national regional trial of new cotton varieties, Lu 05H9 showed an obvious advantage in increasing production compared with similar varieties. In the two-year regional test of hybrid cotton in the Yellow River Basin, the average yield of seed cotton and lint per mu was 247.8 kg and 102.0 kg respectively, which was 9.5% and 9.6% higher than that of the control Lumianyan 15, ranking first among the tested varieties in the same group. Production demonstrations all over the country showed that the variety had good seedling emergence, strong seedling potential, resistance to Fusarium wilt and Verticillium wilt, high resistance to cotton bollworm, good high yield and stability, good fiber quality, and good value of popularization and application.