Abstract:Cotton is the most widely cultivated fiber crops in the world. With the improvement of people's living standards and the development of cotton textile industry, the demand for high-quality cotton fiber is constantly increasing. In this study, a large-scale genetic population was generated from a cross of a G. barbadense introgression line ZP171. This line contains the upland cotton (G. hirsutum) variety CCRI 8 genetic background with everal chromosome segments of G. barbadense Pima 90-53. The results revealed significant correlation in fibre length (FL) and fiber strength (FS) if compared with other fiber quality traits, and moderately high broad-sense heritability in FL and FS. Moreover, the variance analysis unlocked abundant genetic variations within the population, which are predictable by using four principal components based on the principal component analysis. Nineteen elite lines with higher fiber length or fiber strength than CCRI 8 were identified across multiple environments, respectively. Collectively, this study provided the elite germplasm resources in fine mapping of functional genes associating with fiber quality and breeding of new cotton varieties.