Baofu Huang¹ , Jie Zhang²

1 Traditional Chinese Medicine Research Center, Cuixi Academy of Biotechnology, Zhuji, 311800, China
2 Institute of Life Sciences, Jiyang Colloge of Zhejiang A&F University, Zhuji, 311800, Zhejiang, China
Author    Correspondence author
Journal of Tea Science Research, 2024, Vol. 14, No. 6   doi: 10.5376/jtsr.2024.14.0029
Received: 28 Sep., 2024    Accepted: 30 Oct., 2024    Published: 20 Nov., 2024

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Huang B.F., and Zhang J., 2024, Secondary metabolism in tea plants: pathways and regulatory mechanisms, Journal of Tea Science Research, 14(6): 313-321 (doi: 10.5376/jtsr.2024.14.0029)

Camellia sinensis, the tea plant, is an economically valuable crop globally due to its unique flavor, nutritional content, and cultural significance. Tea quality is largely a result of a versatile array of secondary metabolites, such as polyphenols, alkaloids, amino acids, and volatile aroma compounds, which are also largely involved in plant defense and environmental tolerance. New findings in plant molecular biology have allowed the identification in great detail of major biosynthetic pathways like the phenylpropanoid-flavonoid pathway, the MVA/MEP terpenoid biosynthetic pathways, purine and caffeine metabolism, and the theanine biosynthesis. Moreover, studies in mechanisms of regulation—spanning from transcription factors and non-coding RNAs to epigenetic modifications—have unraveled multilayered control mechanisms governing the biosynthesis of metabolites. The integration of transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics, and epigenomics has further revealed the spatial-temporal gene expression and metabolic dynamics upon environmental stimuli. The recent advances in tea plant secondary metabolism research are reviewed, application of gene editing, marker-assisted selection, and synthetic biology in metabolic engineering highlighted, and prospects and challenges in the future are elaborated. Increased understanding of secondary metabolic networks and their regulation will provide the major tools for molecular breeding and ensure the introduction of sustainable development in the tea industry.

Tea plant; Secondary metabolism; Biosynthetic pathway; Regulatory mechanism; Molecular breeding