An EST (GenBank accession no. DR792958) that exhibited significant expression differences during fiber initiation stages in lintless-fuzzless XinWX and linted-fuzzless XinFLM isogenic lines in a 29K cotton genome array hybridization was used to search the Gossypium EST database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) and in a BLAST search. Identified EST sequences were spliced with CAP3 to form contigs, which were subsequently used as probes in BLASTn searches until the contigs were no longer extended. The open reading frame (ORF) of the longest contig was named as GhAOC in a BLASTp search annotated by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI),USA. In order to confirm the full-length cDNA, primers to amplify the complete ORF were designed using Primer Premier 5.0 (Premier, Canada). Genomic and cDNA GhAOC sequences were isolated from TM-1 genomic DNA and 10 days post anthesis (DPA) fiber cDNA, respectively. The primers used in this study are shown in Table 1. Oligo synthesis and DNA sequencing
were performed by Nanjing Genscript Bio-Technology Co. Ltd., China.