Molecular Tools for Tea Breeding in China

Molecular marker assisted selection, micropropagation techniques and genomics tools, such as cDNA microarray, are being used to accelerate tea breeding efforts in China. Tea is a very important source of export revenue in China and other countries such as Kenya, India and Sri Lanka. Together, these four countries account for more than 60% of tea exports worldwide.

Chinese researchers report that more than 3,000 accessions of tea conserved by the China National Germplasm Tea Repositories (CNGTR) can be utilized to develop cultivars that are higher yielding, have higher cup quality, contain elevated levels of functional components, and are more tolerant to biotic and abiotic stresses.

Molecular markers are useful in constructing tea genetic linkage maps, and to appraise and evaluate germplasm for desirable genes. Genetic engineering, transformation techniques, and RNA interference (RNAi) technologies offers a lot of potential on the crop, however a lot in these methods still need to be improved so that they could be routinely used. The researchers propose that RNAi be explored as it may be useful in developing tea cultivars with low or no caffeine.

The complete review article was published in Euphytica and accessible to subscribers at http://www.springerlink.com/content/vw7322n354543082/