Abstract
Tea (Camellia sinensis, (L.) Kuntze) is considered as most popular drink across the world and it is widely consumed beverage for its several health-benefit characteristics. These positive traits primarily rely on its regulatory networks of different metabolic pathways. Development of microsatellite markers from the conserved genomic regions are being worthwhile for reviewing the genetic diversity of closely related species or self-pollinated species. Although several SSR markers have been reported, in tea, the trait-specific Simple Sequence Repeat (SSR) markers, leading to be useful in marker assisted breeding technique, are yet to be identified. Micro RNAs are short, non-coding RNA molecules, involved in post transcriptional mode of gene regulation and thus effects on related phenotype. Present study deals with identification of the microsatellite motifs within the reported and predicted miRNA precursors that are effectively followed by designing of primers from SSR flanking regions in order to PCR validation. In addition to the earlier reports, two new miRNAs are predicting here from tea expressed tag sequence database. Furthermore, 18 SSR motifs are found to be in 13 of all 33 predicted miRNAs. Trinucleotide motifs are most abundant among all followed by dinucleotides. Since, miRNA based SSR markers are evidenced to have significant role on genetic fingerprinting study, these outcomes would pave the way in developing novel markers for tagging tea specific agronomic traits as well as substantiating non-conventional breeding program.
Highlights
Tea (Camellia sinensis) is most popularly consumed beverage across the world and being a cash-crop, it receives much attention to the scientific community
Among different markers used in crop improvement and molecular breeding technique, microsatellite markers are profoundly used for its reliability and time saving method
Result and discussion In the present study, previously reported miRNA sequences were utilized to find their homolog ones from tea as it is already known that plant mature miRNAs are highly conserved within the plant kingdom, and miRNA genes in one species may exist as orthologs or homologs in other species [30, 37]
Summary
Tea (Camellia sinensis) is most popularly consumed beverage across the world and being a cash-crop, it receives much attention to the scientific community. Demand for quality tea has increased much to Molecular marker assisted technique in breeding programme for the selection or development of cultivars with desired trait from a large population is well established [5]. Due to being co-dominant, abundant, hyper-variable and co-operative to high-throughput analysis, microsatellite markers are considered as ideal for plant genetic linkage mapping, physical mapping, population studies, genotype identification and crop improvement [6]. Predominant of such markers like SSR, ISSR, EST-SSR have been effectively utilized in several crop improvement program [7,8,9,10,11].
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