AFLP-Based Genetic Diversity Assessment of Commercially Important Tea Germplasm in India

Abstract

India has a large repository of important tea accessions and, therefore, plays a major role in improving production and quality of tea across the world. Using seven AFLP primer combinations, we analyzed 123 commercially important tea accessions representing major populations in India. The overall genetic similarity recorded was 51%. No significant differences were recorded in average genetic similarity among tea populations cultivated in various geographic regions (northwest 0.60, northeast and south both 0.59). UPGMA cluster analysis grouped the tea accessions according to geographic locations, with a bias toward China or Assam/Cambod types. Cluster analysis results were congruent with principal component analysis. Further, analysis of molecular variance detected a high level of genetic variation (85%) within and limited genetic variation (15%) among the populations, suggesting their origin from a similar genetic pool.

SSR Marker Based Dna Fingerprinting and Diversity Assessment in Superior Tea Germplasm Cultivated in Western Himalaya

“…Further, high level of hetozygosity (av Ho 0.775; He 0.847) revealed by SSR markers analysis suggested high level of out crossing in tea. These results are congruent with previous AFLP analysis of selected tea collections from western Himalaya (Karthigeyan et al, 2008;Sharma et al, 2010). Present SSR analysis revealed that China/China hybrids and Assam accessions shared 22 % average GS.…”

“…Related C. japonica was clustered as a solitary out-group. Interestingly, single accessions from (CSIN303536) was grouped with China/China hybrids from western Himalayan region as earlier reported in AFLP analysis (Sharma et al, 2010). Further, SSR markers used in this study could differentiate each one of China/China hybrids and Assam types in spite of the high degree of similarity in morphology and geographical locations.…”

“…Based on agroclimatic conditions, some potential tea areas have also been identified in the valleys of Sihunta, Chowari, banikhet and Chamba. Considering the limitations of conventional tea breeding, simultaneous efforts were also made to characterize potential tea accession at molecular and biochemical level (Sharma et al, 2010;Karthigeyan et al2008). Among the various markers, microsatellite markers due to co-dominance inheritance, locus specificity, hyper-variability coupled with genome wide distribution gained considerable importance for evolutionary, plant genetics and breeding studies (Gupta et al, 2000;Woodhead M et al 2005).…”

Genetic diversity and relationship of Dongting biluochun tea germplasm in Suzhou revealed by SSR markers.

“…Molecular marker have proven to be a powerful approach for the study of genetic variation, relationships, molecular identification, and phylogeny of different cultivars, as well as for cultivar discrimination and fingerprinting of plant species (Boczkowska et al, 2012;Frascaroli et al, 2013;El-Esawi et al, 2016;Lassois et al, 2016). The different types of molecular markers such as random amplification of polymorphic DNA (RAPD) (Arakawa et al, 2016), restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP), inter simple sequence repeats (ISSR) (Devarumath et al, 2002;Liu et al, 2015), amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) (Sharma et al, 2010;Ji et al, 2012), single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) , and microsatellites or simple sequence repeats (SSR) (Taniguchi et al, 2014;Liu et al, 2017) have already been used for genetic and genomic analysis in tea plants. Of these approaches, SSR has become an important technique used in tea plant genetics and breeding for its multi-allelic nature, codominant inheritance, relative abundance, extensive genome coverage and simple detection (Zhao et al, 2008).…”

The identification and evaluation of two different color variations of tea

“…Therefore, evaluation of the existing germplasm using different biochemical parameters that affect tea quality is an important method for selecting valuable germplasm. In recent years, numerous studies aiming to evaluate the germplasm resources of tea plants have also been conducted by incorporating various methods, including morphology, biochemistry and the use of genetic markers, such as random amplified polymorphic DNAs, restriction fragment length polymorphisms, inter‐simple sequence repeats and amplified fragment length polymorphisms, amongst others. Indeed, phenotypes can be referred to as rough standards for the evaluation of tea germplasms.…”