Assessment of tea plant (Camellia sinensis L.) accessions for pollen sources in natural crossing by using microsatellites

Tea (Camellia sinensis L. [O.] Kuntze) is a highly cross-pollinated and self-incompatible plant. Seeds can be harvested from specific individual mother plants in polyclonal tea gardens. Whether the pollen donor plays an important role in seed formation remains unclear. This study aimed to identify the male parents of 72 natural hybridized progenies (F1) from one female parent on the basis of a putative specific allele by using simple-sequence repeat (SSR) markers and the exclusion-likelihood method with Cervus 3.0 software. The genetic material, which comprised seven accessions of C. sinensis L., was acquired from Assamica planted in the Kayulandak polyclonal seed garden of the Pagilaran tea plantation in Batang District, Central Java, Indonesia, and was studied during 2019 and 2020. The genotype PGL-15 was used as the female parent, whereas the six candidate genotypes PGL-10, GMB-9, GMB-7, TPS-93, GMB-11, and TRI-2025 were used as the male parents. In this study, 13 SSR loci were used to identify the male parents of the F1 progenies obtained through natural hybridization between one female and six male tea accessions. Results indicated that the exclusion-likelihood method, which correctly predicted 100% of the male parents, was more effective than the putative specific allele approach, which correctly predicted only 34.72% of the male parents in the 72 hybridized F1 progenies of tea plants.