Genetic integrity of somaclonal variants in tea (Camellia sinensis (L.) O Kuntze) as revealed by inter simple sequence repeats

Adoption of inter simple sequence repeats (ISSR) technique to analyze the genetic variability of somatic embryo derived tea plants was evaluated. Morphological characterisation of the field grown plants revealed no identical character aligning with the parent, UPASI-10. Out of 40 primers, 15 exhibited concurrent polymorphism were selected for the study. Genetic variability of somaclones derived from single line cotyledonary culture ranged from 33.0 to 55.0%. A unique fragment of 1.2 Kb was visible in majority of the accessions whereas the fragments below the length of 0.6 Kb were noticed only in 50% of the variants. Out of 120 interactions attempted using Pearson's coefficient correlation, only 9.2% of somaclones exhibited significant similarity at genetic level. Dendrogram constructed based on simple matching coefficient revealed a distance of 2.257–3.317 between the final clusters. This strengthens the existence of wide genetic variation among the somaclones.