Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Market Challenges, Opportunities, and Commercialization
Barriers
All industries face challenges into the future, and cotton is no exception. Compe-
tition between cotton and synthetics has shown cotton to have a steady decline in
market share. However, with population increase, the total consumption of cotton
has remained relatively constant. Of course competition is healthy, and there will
continue to be blends between cotton and other fibers, but to compete with syn-
thetics, cotton will need to improve quality without being more expensive. The
economics around the use of cotton for textiles also creates challenges for breeders
striving for enhanced fiber quality, as the incentive to advance quality is constrained
by the lack of economic rewards for producers who achieve any higher quality fiber.
Such a moving target is common in breeding but does add complexity to the
process.
The anticipated availability of genome sequences of all the cultivated cotton
species will open up many new opportunities to integrate conventional and marker-
assisted selection and backcrossing or genomic selection. The higher marker
density and tighter associations possible in association mapping will more accu-
rately identify multiple regions contributing to traits. This will allow the identifi-
cation of the underlying genes and open up new approaches to manipulating those
traits either through selection or GM.
The push toward incorporation of high-value GM traits such as insect and
herbicide tolerance can lead to reduced attention on the discovery of new conven-
tional breeding material and a concomitant drop in public breeding efforts
[
168
]. Adequate resourcing of breeding programs is therefore required as well as
attention to traits that may be of specific regional value that may be easily swamped
by the push to adopting the latest “global” GM traits.
Many of the novel GM fiber traits attempted to date still remain academic
exercises, and while they do provide useful biological information about the roles
of various genes in fiber development or the types of novel traits that could be
supported at a cellular or metabolic level, there is considerable research required
before they could be deployed commercially. Firstly, most have been introduced
into nonelite cultivars and would need to be introgressed into elite backgrounds for
proper assessment and deployment. Secondly, it is unclear whether they would be
additive, as they might improve the properties of an originally poor quality, but
transformable cultivar, but would they provide the same enhancement to an elite
cultivar. Many of the changed properties of GM fibers are still small and, particu-
larly where metabolic pathways are being manipulated, would require further
optimization. Finally, the cost of registration of a GM trait is still incredibly high,
so can only be justified when it provides a high-value outcome. Many potentially
useful GM traits, such as those for better fiber quality, would struggle to return the
value of the trait registration and so are unlikely to be taken up unless they can
establish a unique niche market or make a substantial contribution to increased
yield.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search