The Toolbox for Fiber Flax Breeding: A Pipeline From Gene Expression to Fiber Quality

Pilot plant for processing flax fiber

A flax fiber pilot plant is needed to process small samples of flax straw into fibers to facilitate research on retting and fiber properties. Our objective was to develop and test a modular design for a flax processing pilot plant based on a commercial line that was capable of cleaning fiber and seed flax straw from unretted, dew-retted, and enzyme-retted samples. The USDA Flax Fiber Pilot Plan...

Flax Fiber: Potential for a New Crop in the Southeast

Overview of Flax Fiber Reinforced Thermoplastic Composites

Flax fibres are oftenly used for reinforcing thermoplastic to manufacture biocomposite materials exhibiting numerous advantages such as high mechanical properties, low density and biodegradability. The mechanical properties of a biocomposite material depends on the nature and orientation of the fibres, the nature of the matrix and mainly on the adhesion between fiber and the polymer matrix. The...

The challenge of getting a high quality of RNA from oocyte for gene expression study

The extraction of intact RNA from oocyte is quite challenging and time-consuming. A standard protocol using commercial RNA extraction kit, yields a low quantity of RNA in oocytes. In the past, several attempts in getting RNA for gene expression study ended up with a few different modified methods. Extraction of high-quality RNA from oocyte is important before further downstream analyses such as...

Cotton reproductive and fiber quality responses to nitrogen nutrition

Nutrient (N) stress affects cotton growth, primary physiological processes andfiber properties. This study utilized two sunlit growth chambers to compare cotton(cv. TM-1) responses to two levels of N nutrition imposed at the onset of floweringstage of development, 100 and 0% of optimum N, in plants grown under otherwiseoptimal temperature and soil moisture conditions. Flowers and bolls were tag...