天然彩色棉的开发现状及对策

A Research for Natural Colored Cotton

对我国天然有色棉育种和产品开发的现状进行了分析探讨，提出了 目前纺织行业在彩色棉产品开发中迫切需要解决的问题。天然彩色棉真正 可以工业化应用的仅有棕色和绿色２种纤维。只有采用生物工程，如辐照 诱变、转基因、克隆等技术，才能从根本上解决彩色棉的色素遗传问题。

Natural colored cotton which is associated with environmental protection is supposed to be an example for fiber development and an inevitable outcome that modern biotech is applied to fiber production. It is estimated that colored cotton will share 1/3 or above of the total cotton production in the coming 30 years. The planting and processing of colored cotton will constitute an important industry by that time. Currently, the United States is the only country in the world whose colored cotton production has made up more than 1% of the total and reached roughly to 30,000 tons every year.Though the production of colored cotton in China has ranked the second place in the world, but it is even less than 1% of that in the United State. Therefore, it is a long journey to take in respect of breeding and development. Colored cotton presents a brilliant future and it is of significance to the construction of the national economy in China. Natural colored cotton now has wide color range of brown, green, yellow,blue, purple and gray, which are needed for textile application. However, only brown and green can actually be applied to industrialized production. The rest have the problems such as pale color,unstable shade, and high genetic variation of colorant and poor fiber quality. The incomplete color range poses one of the causes that restrict large-scale development of colored cotton products. To cultivate hereditarily stable, good color fastness, dark-shade cotton in a wide color range has become the top task for every country that develops colored cotton products. Judged from the current researches on colored cotton, it is not a solution to adopt the traditional methods like sexual hybridization, distant hybridization and systematic seed selection, but bioengineering methods instead, such as irradiation-induced variation, genetic modification and clone. Thus, the problem concerning colorant heredity can be solved. The colored cotton breed in China has reached the world level in terms of fiber length and strength. By means of pure spinning and blended spinning, it has successfully process colored cotton into the yarns respectively of 20s, 40s and 60s. The blended cotton yarn of 60s (75% white cotton) comes up to the average of the statistics of Uster Bulletin published in 1997. This proves that development of high-count colored cotton yarns in China is also as high as the world level. However, it is now almost impossible to enrich the spectrums into a complete range and improve the breed of colored cotton. The principle work will be oriented towards fiber processing and development of high value-added finished colored cotton products. It is therefore very important to strengthen the researches on blended yarn processing theory and process, the study of basic theory for colored cotton and development of environment-friendly finishing process for colored cotton products.