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Diversity distribution and population structure of tea germplasms in China revealed by EST-SSR markers

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Abstract

Tea plant (Camellia sinensis (L.) O. Kuntze) originated from China, where distributed abundant genetic resources. It is of critical importance to well understanding of genetic diversity and population structure for effective collection, conservation, and utilization of tea germplasms. In this study, 96 new polymorphic EST-SSR markers were developed and used to analyze 450 tea accessions collected from 14 tea-producing regions across China. A total of 409 alleles were observed, and the gene diversity (H) and polymorphic information content (PIC) were estimated to be averagely 0.64 and 0.61, respectively, across all the tested samples. The higher level of genetic diversity was observed in original regions like Guangxi, Yunnan, and Guizhou provinces. The allele number, H, and PIC showed decreasing trend when the region was more and more away from origin center of tea plant, which gave us implications on the spreading route of tea plant in China. The clustering of 450 samples both showed a clear separation according to their geographic origin based on either model simulation or genetic distance. The genetic differentiation was further analyzed among five inferred populations represented different eco-geographic regions. The lowest F st and the closest relationship were revealed between proximal populations, which indicated that gene exchanges occurred frequently between nearby regions than distance ones. The majority of genetic variation resulted from differentiation within population (81.36%) rather than among inferred (13.6%) and regional (5.04%) populations based on analysis of molecular variance. Our study also revealed that the lower diversity and simpler population structure were found in improved cultivars than wild teas and landraces, which indicated that genetic base of developed cultivars became narrow because of long-standing domestication and artificial selection. So more attentions should be focused to conserve and utilize the beneficial genes in wild teas and landraces to broaden genetic variation of new cultivars in future breeding of the tea plant.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the associate editor Dr. Yoshihiko Tsumura and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions. This work was supported, in part, by the Earmarked Fund for China Agriculture Research System (CARS-023) to Liang Chen and the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC; no. 30901159) to Ji-Qiang ** and Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang province (no. Y3110260) to Ming-Zhe Yao.

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  1. National Center for Tea Improvement, Tea Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, 9 South Meiling Road, Hangzhou, 310008, China

    Ming-Zhe Yao, Chun-Lei Ma, Ting-Ting Qiao, Ji-Qiang ** & Liang Chen

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  1. Ming-Zhe Yao
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  2. Chun-Lei Ma
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  3. Ting-Ting Qiao
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  4. Ji-Qiang **
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Correspondence to Liang Chen.

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Communicated by Y. Tsumura

Ming-Zhe Yao and Chun-Lei Ma contributed equally to this work.

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Yao, MZ., Ma, CL., Qiao, TT. et al. Diversity distribution and population structure of tea germplasms in China revealed by EST-SSR markers. Tree Genetics & Genomes 8, 205–220 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11295-011-0433-z

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