DNA fingerprinting of oil camellia cultivars with SSR markers

Oil camellia (Camellia oleifera Abel.) is a widely cultivated economically important plant. In China, more than 100 elite cultivars have been authorized for commercial plantations, representing the developmental base for the oil camellia industry. Since oil camellia seedlings are frequently traded and introduced to new places, there is an active demand to develop a rapid and reliable identification toolkit to protect and ensure the effective use of these resources. In this study, ten highly polymorphic simple sequence repeat (SSR) primer pairs were screened from the SSR primer database of oil camellia, and DNA fingerprints of 128 elite oil camellia cultivars were constructed with these primer pairs. By analyzing the fingerprinting profiles, all of these cultivars were found to have unique DNA fingerprints, except 'Changlin 40' and 'Fuyang 40', which shared a complete similarity across all of the fingerprints generated by these ten SSR primer pairs, indicating that they were either synonyms or vegetative mutants. Synonyms are a major source of confusion in protecting and managing new varieties of plants. Although the synonymy of these two cultivars needs to be further confirmed, our data indicated a high possibility of synonyms among the authorized oil camellia cultivars. This study provides a desirable genetic toolkit for the identification and management of the elite oil camellia cultivars, and also for the intellectual property right protection of breeders.