Profiling of Few of the Tea Accessions on Physiological Growth and Stress Tolerance

Abstract

Tea [Camellia sinensis(L) O Kuntz] is one of the oldest, most widely consumed and least expensive natural beverages, known to the world over for its heritage brew with various flavor and antioxidant properties. The productivity of tea in world as well as in India has been raised by developing high yielding clones and seed stocks but the genetic base of the existing diversity of the crop is rapidly narrowing down. In present scenario, apart from yield and quality, physiological parameters and abiotic stress tolerance are also raising up to be the most important environmental indicator impacting on sustainability and productivity of tea. In the published research work, an effort was made to characterize and estimate the variation of 20 tea germplasm named as THT1 to THT20, growing in the Experimental Garden for Plantation Crops, AAU, Jorhat on the basis of growth parameters and abiotic stress tolerance capability of tea.  In the experiment all the germplasm showed highly significant difference amongst them regarding growth parameters, pigment content and on abiotic stress tolerance. THT 1, THT 10, THT 3 contained higher total chlorophyll and THT 4, THT 10, THT 20 showed high carotene content. In case of growth parameters THT 11, THT 7, THT5 showed higher plucking point density whereas THT 11, THT 17, THT 7 showed good abiotic stress tolerance with high value of proline content, relative turgidity, water saturation deficit and epicuticular wax content. When clustering was done based on abiotic stress tolerance, pigment and growth parameters respectively, THT11 and THT 17 are found to form a discriminated cluster in the dendogram. The parameters taken especially for abiotic stress tolerance study may be subjected to environmental factors for which more elaborated field trial may be required for these clones to assess their yield and quality parameters.