PROSPECTS OF THE REMOTE HYBRIDIZATION ON IMPROVEMENT OF THE MAIN ECONOMICAL TRAITS OF COTTON GENOTYPES WITH NATURALLY COLORED FIBRE

Due to the insufficient quality of varieties with naturally colored fiber, their cultivation on a global scale is limited. For the first time in Azerbaijan, an attempt was made to investigate the possibility of improving the qualitative and economic traits in genotypes with brown fiber. For this, distant hybridization was carried out between tetraploid cultivars of the G. hirsutum L. (white fiber) and artificially obtained amphidiploids with a doubled set of chromosomes from the diploid specie G. arboreum L. (brown fiber), from the local Genbank. On this basis, during 2017-2019, distant hybrids with colored fiber and contrasting quality and productivity potential were studied in detail and identified. Qualitative traits such as micronair (Mic), strength (Str), and Uniformity Index (UI) were found to be comparable to the best parent with white fiber in hybrids with colored fibers, but the Upper Half Mean Length (UHML) still to be improved. The "number of bolls per plant" makes the maximum positive contribution to the total cotton yield. According to the results of the averaged data of two generations (F1 and F2), a change in the degree and direction of correlations between the studied characters, depending on the intensity of the fiber color, was noted.