Cotton is a natural fiber produced by a perennial tree that has been domesticated to grow as an annual plant. The extensive research done on cotton became more formal and better understandable after it was discovered that there are genes that carry ablueprint of the characters to be expressed under a given set of growing conditions. Such discoveries, unimaginable in the early years of cotton research, were severely questioned and remained shelved for about half a century. The theory of evolution didnot satisfactorily address many concerns and it was practically impossible to give up the long-held belief in the inheritance of acquired characters. Fortunately, however, the law of inheritance of characters and the independent assortment of genes wererediscovered and applied. Thus began the formal breeding process we know today, and the world's most important natural fiber crop best benefitted from this is cotton. Almost another half century went by before the structure of DNA was described in the 1950s. The interspecies transference of genes was followed by the technique of actually modifying the DNA. Once again, cotton was the crop that benefitted most from the interspecies crossover of genes, which by now is no longer a novelty. Cotton was one of the first crops to make use of recombinant DNA technology to induce a mechanism of inbuilt resistance to the most damaging bollworms and tolerance to the most frequently used herbicides. Currently, over two thirds of the world cotton area is planted toinsect-resistant and herbicide-tolerant biotech varieties created by means of the thorough implementation of the development process mentioned above. The present article does not deal exclusively with cotton but also discusses, to a limited extent, the other natural fibers and the challenges they face, particularly in view of the rapid growth in the production of manmade fibers.
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