Cottonseed oil is the valuable byproduct extracted after seed cotton processing for lint. It confers a huge contribution to total vegetable oil production and ranked the 2nd to meet global edible oil requirements. Over centuries, breeders mainly focused to improve lint production and fiber quality. Now attention has been given to improve the cottonseed oil percentage, its functional and nutritional properties. However, these efforts are less than other major oilseed crops which left cottonseed oil market behind in term of consumer demand and kept cott on seed oil industry at vuln erable positi on. Con siderable progress has been made to alter the relative percentage of fatty acid composition still intensified efforts have been required to meet the global oilseed demand. The objective of this review is to explore the cotton germplasm variation for seed oil carrying potential, its utilization in suitable breeding programs, seed oil biosynthetic pathways, major genes, and QTLs linked to quantity and quality enhancement of oil and deployment of modern genomic tools, viz., gene silencing and transgenic development to ameliorate its nutritional properties.
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