中文摘要：

棉花原生质体培养已在多个棉种上取得成功，体细胞杂交也取得了较大的进展，创造出多个种间体细胞杂种，为棉花遗传改良提供了丰富的种质资源。结合本实验室的研究进展，综述了棉花原生质体培养和体细胞杂交的基本技术、研究现状、存在问题和应用前景，为棉花基因工程和细胞工程研究提供有益的借鉴。

英文摘要：

Plant regeneration from protoplasts has proved a very useful technique for crop genetic improvement programs, genetic transformation, and somatic hybridization etc. Now reliable procedures are available for protoplast isolation and culture from a range of high plants including cotton. There were many successful reports on plant regeneration from protoplast. Great progresses was also made for cotton somatic hybridization via protoplast fusion, several inter-specific hybrids were created. As is known, there were 47 wild species,which have advantageous properties such as disease and herbicide resistance that the genetic improvements need. Somatic hybridization is a unique useful way to transfer both nuclear and cytoplasmic genes of different wild species simultaneously in comparison to chromosomal and gene engineering. The success of protoplast fusion in cotton was based on the effective system of cotton protoplast culture, and plant regeneration via somatic embryogenesis from protoplasts was a key step to somatic hybridization. So it is necessary to establish a highly reproducible system for efficient plant regeneration from protoplasts or fused protoplasts in cotton. Advances on fundamental techniques, research status, problems, and promising development of cotton protoplast culture, as well as the somatic hybridization were reviewed, in order to offer beneficial references for cotton gene and chromosome engineering.