The emergence of genome manipulation methods promises a real revolution in biotechnology and genetic engineering. Targeted editing of the genomes of living organisms not only permits investigations into the understanding of the fundamental basis of biological systems but also allows addressing a wide range of goals towards improving productivity and quality of crops. This includes the creation of plants with valuable compositional properties and with traits that confer resistance to various biotic and abiotic stresses. During the past few years, several novel genome editing systems have been developed; these include zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/Cas9 (CRISPR/Cas9). These exciting new methods, briefly reviewed herein, have proved themselves as effective and reliable tools for the genetic improvement of plants.

Global climate change manifested in average annual temperature rise and imbalance of most natural factors, such as changes in annual mean rainfall, air humidity, average temperature of cold and warm months, soil quality, etc., lead to climatic zones displacement. All these have a significant impact on agricultural production in total, including cotton growing. Cotton is one of the most important technical crops in the world. However, it is very sensitive to environmental changes. The influence of abiotic stresses (high temperature, changes in the mean rainfall and soil salinity) causes a dramatic decrease yield of this crop. Moreover, temperature anomalies and climatic zones displacement cause a change in the area of pathogens and pests distribution, which also reduces the cotton yield. One of the possible ways to increase the cotton yield under the influence of abiotic and biotic stresses is the development of new resistant varieties, using both classical breeding methods and genetic engineering achievements.

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Cotton is one of the most important crops in the world. The Gossypium genus is represented by 50 species, divided into two levels of ploidy: diploid (2n = 26) and tetraploid (2n = 52). This diversity of Gossypium species provides an ideal model for studying the evolution and domestication of polyploids. In this regard, studies of the origin and evolution of polyploid cotton species are crucial for understanding the ways and mechanisms of gene and genome evolution. In addition, studies of polyploidization of the cotton genome will allow to more accurately determine the localization of QTLs that determine fiber quality. In addition, due to the fact that cotton fibers are single trichomes originating from epidermal cells, they are one of the most favorable model systems for studying the molecular mechanisms of regulation of cell and cell wall elongation, as well as cellulose biosynthesis.