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Abstract
Due to a repeated number of bottlenecks, including domestication, upland cotton, Gossypium hirsutum, has become extremely genetically impoverished. Cotton is a very important global crop, so it is important that fiber quality traits in cotton are able to improved to continue to be competitive against synthetic fibers. This research uses a variety of methods, incorporating exotic relatives, mutagenesis, and hybridization, to increase the genetic variation present in cotton. Exotic relatives were incorporated into elite lines using a nested association mapping population. Previously, elite cotton lines were treated with a mutagenesis chemical, and this research aims to map the mutations that conferred a fiber quality benefit. The lines created by mutagenesis were also used in hybridization with lines developed by QTL stacking. These methods successfully improved a variety of fiber quality characteristics which could be extremely useful as economic resources.