January 5th 2005: NSF cotton fiber genomics project meeting was held in USDA-ARS, Southern Regional Research Center, New Orleans, LA. Members from each lab gave short presentations about the progress made and discussed about the future plans as well. This meeting was held in conjunction with the Beltwide Cotton Conference (Jan. 4th-7th) in New Orleans, LA.

December 2004: TM-1 ovule (-3 ~ +3 DPA) full-length cDNA library construction was completed. 51,072 clones were arrayed in 384-well plates (133 plates). Duplicate sets were made and one set was sent to TIGR for sequencing. 49,920 cDNAs (130 plates) are being sequenced at TIGR and ~40,000 ESTs are expected to be generated soon.

October 2004: Chen and Stelly will participate in the International Cotton Genome Initiative (ICGI) biennial meeting in Hyderabad, India. Stelly is the elected Chair of ICGI and Chen has organized a session that will examine possible elements and approaches to a sequencing effort.

October 15th-16th, 2004: Sreenath Palle, graduate research assistant, will attend “Pathways to the Doctorate” programmatic conference in southern Texas. The Texas A&M University System developed the program to advance higher education opportunities, and, perhaps even more important, awareness of those opportunities in all regions of the state. The conferences rotate among System institutions, and the Pathways program thereby takes advantage of its nine universities (>100K students) to find and foster pursuit of doctorate degrees by talented individuals from most of the state, including large regions where the challenges and opportunities socio-economic development at greatest. Involvement of the Fiber Genomics with the Pathways program is particularly good fit, as the crop is grown throughout many regions of the state, so the subject matter will be of wide interest.

October 8th, 2004: Deadline for submitting FY2005 grant proposals to Plant Genome Research Program.

September 23rd-24th, 2004: J. Chen and B. Triplett attend the NSF New Awardee's Meeting in Washington, D.C.

September 22nd, 2004: Announcement of the new projects funded by the NSF Plant Genome Research Program.

September 13rd, 2004: Total RNAs were purified from immature ovules collected at -3, 0, and +3 days post anthesis (DPA). A full-length cDNA library is under construction.

September, 2004: Sreenath Palle (M.Sc., B.Sc.) joined as a graduate research assistant with Dr. Stelly’s group as part of the Fiber Genomics project team.

September 1st, 2004: Dr. Suk Hawn Yang joined the project in the Chen lab as a Postdoctoral Researcher and part-time Manager for the project. Ning (Edward) Wei, a Ph. D. student in Computer Science, is working in the Chen and Sze labs on computational analysis of sequence and microarray data being generated. Jenny Lee, a Ph. D. student in Genetics, continues to work on functional analysis of cotton orthologous genes in Arabidopsis.

September 1st, 2004: Ms. Ra'sheedah Richardson, an African American graduate student in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture at TAMU is working with Dr. P. Thaxton to develop an educational module for middle school students and teachers.

September 1st, 2004: The NSF Cotton Fiber Genomics project website is running.

June 25th, 2004: The first project planning meeting on Cotton Fiber Genomics was held at TAMU.