[Studies on tea plants (Camellia sinensis) germplasms using EST-SSR marker].

Forty two tea varieties were analyzed by using 16 SSR primer sets derived from tea ESTs in this study, and 13 of the primer sets produced clear bands and 10 of them showed polymorphism, accounting for 76.9%. The PIC (polymorphism information content) for each polymorphic primer set varied from 0.522 to 0.866, with a average about 0.73. Totally 84 Genotypes and 74 alleles were detected in all materials by 10 polymorphic markers, with the range from 4 to 12 and from 3 to 10 for each polymorphic primer set, respectively. The genetic distance among 42 tea varieties varied from 0.074 to 0.667, averagely 0.363, suggesting that the materials used in the experiment possess a broad genetic variation. Based on the similarity coefficient about 0.55, all the tea varieties tested could be classified into 3 groups and most of them were in first group. The results of this study proved that the EST-SSR marker is very effective in evaluation of tea germplasms.