Decoding tea (Camellia assamica) genome for the identification of commercially important genes

Tea is an important plantation crop of India. It is employment generating, eco-friendly industry that supports the economy of the developing country like India. India is largest consumer and second largest producer of tea in the world. It earns huge foreign exchange by export. Past several decades the varietal improvement is based on conventional breeding through selection of the existing bushes. Genetic erosion, lack of mutant and non-availability of bi-allelic mapping population or structured population are some of the major bottle necks in tea breeding. Thus marker assisted breeding is suitable choice. But very few genomic resources are available with compare to similar plantation crop. The genomic resources in tea are much less compared to the others related species. Therefore, we need to generate a high quality draft sequence of tea genome to facilitate its breeding. In this project, we produce genomic data (PacBio and HiSeq Illumina) for Indian Tea (Camellia assamica). We carry out genome assemblies and annotation and identify several agronomically important genes.