China is leading the world in the development and research of colored cotton, announced Zhang Zhennan, an established cotton researcher and head of the Genetically Modified Colored Cotton Institute of northwestern China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

Zhang was in Shanghai for a fair to promote garments made of colored cotton.

A total of 27 countries have been conducting the relevant researches and development of colored cotton, including the United States, China, Brazil, Egypt, Peru and India.

Nine strains of colored cotton have been approved by governments of different countries for patent rights or naming and have been authorized for mass production.

Of the nine widely recognized colored cotton strains, five were developed by Chinese research organizations, primarily the Xinjiang cotton research institute.

China was capable of turning out brown and green cotton, said Zhang, adding that researchers from the institute had been working with the Hereditary Science Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) to produce red, blue and black cotton by transferring an external colored gene into naturally grown white cotton with genetic engineering technology.

(Xinhua News Agency July 23, 2003)