ANNOUNCEMENTS
Tea (Camellia sinensis) originated from Indo-China border is now distributed all across the world; it is one of the most popular nonalcoholic beverage in the world. Tea is self-incompatible and out crossing plant which has led to the development of large number of hybrids. For effective collection, utilization and conservation of tea plants genetic diversity and population structure studies are very important. There is large number of markers present for the assessment of genetic diversity in a population; morphological, biochemical and molecular. Morphological and biochemical markers are highly influenced by the environment, so results are not reliable. Molecular markers are developed for genetic level study and as they are not influenced by the environment and gives more reliable results.
In this study, SSR markers were used, because they show high polymorphism, co-dominant nature and abundance in the genome. Here 80 SSR markers were designed covering all the 15 chromosomes of tea genome and were screened in 9 tea genotypes for polymorphism. Around, 27 of them were found to be polymorphic. But for the final study 6 out of 27 polymorphic markers were selected and were used for the diversity analysis of 36 tea genotypes. A binary matrix was generated for final 6 markers. Polymorphism information content (PIC) was calculated and it was found to be 0.61 to 0.76 which suggest that these 6 could be used for further diversity analysis in tea. Percentage Similarity between 36 genotypes was calculated, dendrogram was constructed using Darwin 6 software which clustered the 36 genotypes into 3 major groups which were further sub Divided.
Key words: Tea (Camellia sinensis), genetic diversity, molecular marker, Polymorphism information content (PIC), SSR (simple sequence repeats).
