The colored fiber cotton presents inferior quality in relation to the white one due to the fact that the colored was poorly studied as far as genetic breeding is concerned. The objective of this work was to verify the effect of mass selection for high, medium and low lint percentage in a population of the cotton cultivar BRS Verde. Five hundred plants were randomly harvested and after ginning, they were separated into four groups, based on lint percentage. Seeds within each class were mixed up to compose the treatments of a trial, ran as a complete randomized block design with four replicates. Treatments comprised four classes plus a sample of original population. Mass selection was efficient in changing the populations means and the overall genetic gain, concerning high lint percentage, was 11%.
cotton; breeding; green fiber; genetic variability
