Morphological and molecular characterization of 5 accessions of tea (Camellia sinensis (L.) O. Kuntze) exploited to develop high quality and quantity yield

Tea is a cross-pollinated and self-incompatible plant. Consequently, it has a very high genetic diversity. This research was aimed to estimate the variability of morphological and molecular characteristics of five accessions which exploited to develop high quality and quantity yield at PT. Pagilaran and compare the efficiency and accuracy of the use of morphological and molecular markers in tea characterization. The accessions consist of three C. assamica tea accessions (TRI 2025, Cinyiruan 143, and Kiara 8), and two C. sinensis tea accessions (Tambi and Tambi Jingga). Morphological observation includes leaf length, leaf width, stalk length, total pekoe, fresh leaf weight, stalk fresh weight, fresh pekoe weight, dry leaf weight, stalk dry weight, and pekoe dry weight, while the molecular observation was performed using SSR markers. Morphological data were analysed using 5 % ANOVA with Tukey-Kramer test and PCA Biplot using SAS 9.4 and R software, whereas the molecular binary data were analysed using the GenAlEx 6 software to estimate variance components, the percentage of polymorphism, and the total number of alleles and specific loci. The dendrogram was created using the Cluster procedure in SAS 9.4. The results showed that molecular characterization provides SSRs markers are more effective for putative genetic markers characterization, and every accession has its own morphological and SSR putative markers.