Molecular identification of Lingyun Baihao wild and cultivated tea through genome-wide sequencing

Abstract The tea plants have been one of the most widely consumed and oldest nonalcoholic beverage crops in the world. Lingyun Baihao tea plants are unique species and widely distribute in Guangxi. It is well known that aroma usually determine the quality of tea. In recent years, molecular identification has been employed in the tea plant at the genetic level. However, the association of aroma loss issues to genetic diversities between wild and cultivated tea plants is not clear. Here, we identified 112,938,224 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and 10,736,211 insertions/deletions (InDels) for the tea plants through the whole genome sequencing technology. Both SNPs and InDels have certain characteristics in the tea genome, which transition in SNPs type distributes wildly comparing with transversion and single base variation has absolute advantage in InDels. These markers demonstrated that DNA polymorphisms and high diversity. Collectively, we confirmed that the loss of aroma might due to genetic differences at the molecular level between wild and cultivated tea plants, which will be valuable resources for further genetic researches of Lingyun Baihao tea plant.