Despite the great potential for increasing cotton productivity through the genetic engineering of fibre development, little progress has so far been made in this area. This is in sharp contrast to the success of pest and herbicide resistant transgenic cotton that have already made a large impact on agriculture in both the U. S. and Australia (2). The major impediment to fibre engineering is our poor understanding of the biology of the cotton fibre, particularly, the identities and functions of genes controlling various fibre developmental processes (I, 2,3,4). Consequently, a recent major thrust has been on elucidating the molecular and cellular basis for fibre development and the cloning of a number of genes highly expressed in developing cotton fibres