DNA-based diversity of tea plants grown in Italy

The only tea [Camellia sinensis (L.) O. Kuntze] cultivation in Italy is located in Lucca (a city in Tuscany region). The major part of the plants of this cultivation derive from the seeds of a common mother plant, still present at the Lucca Botanical Garden, of unknown origin. A specimen imported from Kyoto, Japan, has generated, through cuttings, other plants that form a separate plot. In this study, 66 tea cultivars belonging to the germplasm collection of the China National Germplasm Tea Repository in the TRICAAS located at Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, and 17 accessions from the Italian cultivation were studied by means of simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. The aim of the study was to determine the genetic relatedness between these accessions, in order to find the possible origin of the Italian tea. In total 83 tea accessions were analysed using 63 SSRs selected from 15 different linkage groups of the tea plant. The results revealed a close correlation between the 16 accessions from seeds and the Chinese tea cultivars belonging to the sinensis variety. In particular, these samples showed a close genetic relationship to the cultivars of the Zhejiang Provinces. The specimen imported from Kyoto, on the other hand, probably belongs to the assamica variety.