Assessment of genetic diversity and relationships among tea genotypes in Iran based on RAPD and ISSR markers

Tea plant (Camellia sinensis L., O.Kuntze) is one of the most popular non-alcoholic beverage crops worldwide. Although tea is important in Iran’s economy, little is known about the pattern of genetic variation among the various tea genotypes grown in Iran.

The relationship and the genetic diversity of 20 genotypes of the tea germplasm belonging to three regions were analyzed to provide guidance for the breeding of tea tree using 10 RAPD and 8 ISSR markers.

Polymorphism percent was 78.6 in RAPD and 68.06 in ISSR fingerprinting. The results of the PIC analysis were in the range of 2 0.44 to 0.49 and 0.34 to 0.50 for RAPD and ISSR respectively. From these results, it can be seen that these primers can detect genetic differences very well. The pairwise similarity coefficient between the genotypes varied from 0.37 to 0.68 for RAPD and from 0.59 to 0.96 for ISSR. The 20 tea genotypes from genetic resources were grouped into three main groups by UPGMA cluster analysis based on RAPD data, and to five main groups by UPGMA cluster analysis based on ISSR data. Both molecular analyses showed a high degree of variation among the genotypes.

Application of others molecular markers such as AFLP, SSR and (cpDNA investigation can help to found the genetic relationships of samples better.

The present study revealed that RAPD and ISSR methods could be successfully utilized to identify genetic diversity and relationship of tea group and this will provide valuable information to assist parental selection in current and future tea breeding programs.