Investigation the efficiency of molecular markers to assess genetic diversity of Iranian tea clones

Objective The genetic diversity of the 20 tea populations collected from the Tea Research Organization of Iran was evaluated using 20 microsatellite markers and 10 RAPD markers. Materials and methods Plant materials in this experiment were 20 tea clones selected from the Tea Research Institute of the Iran. DNA extraction from young leaf samples of tea populations was performed with a few changes using the CTAB method. In this study, 20 microsatellite markers and 10 RAPD markers were used to study the genetic variation of tea populations. Results The results showed that SSR and RAPD markers produced 105 and 160 polymorphic bands, respectively.Among the microsatellite markers, the MSE0143 and the MSG0681 primers with 9 bands and the MSG0610 primer with 2 bands produced the highest and the least number of amplified bands. MSG0681, MSE0113, MSG0403 markers with the highest amount of observed allele, effective allele, Nei index, Shannon index and PIC were identified as the most effective markers for analyzing genetic diversity in the studied tea genotypes. Among the RAPD markers, the OS-03 primer with 19 bands produced the highest number of bands and the OR-12 primer with 13 bands produced the least number of bands. Conclusions By comparing the mean PIC of the two marker systems, the microsatellite markers were more effective than RAPD markers. For example, the mean PIC value for SSR markers was measured 0.66 across the tea germplasm. By comparing QND and EMI indices, we found that microsatellite markers were superior to RAPD markers. Also, by comparing the results of cluster analysis of two markers, the microsatellite markers were better able to classify individuals based on their geographic origin.