The cotton boll contains the seeds of the plant to which long, white fibres are attached. The cotton industry takes advantage of these fibres to spin yarns for textile production.

The purpose of the travel was to present at the 2005 Genetics Society of Australasia (GSA) conference in Auckland, on the results obtained from CRDC project UA12C to an international audience, and to gain information

Cotton fibres, or lint, are very long single cells containing almost pure cellulose. The fibres develop in the weeks after flowering from single cells on the surface of the young seed.

Currently, the qualities that are being engineered into cotton relate to crop management issues such as insect-resistance (Frutos et al.