Tea is the world’s most ancient and most widely consumed caffeine soft drinks, the current global more than 160 countries, 3 billion people drink tea tea. It is widely believed that tea originated in China’s Yunnan, Sichuan and other places. Tea trees are commercially grown on more than 3.8 million hectares of land on various continents. In 2014, the world’s tea production was 5.56 million t. Since 2010, an international consortium around Lizhi GAO, CAS Kunming Institute of Botany, has studied Camellia sinensis var. Assamica tea and assembled about 3.02 billion base pairs in a high quality genome reference map, coding for 36,951 proteins. The results show that the expression level of key genes related to tea polyphenols and caffeine biosynthesis in tea plants is significantly higher than that in non-tea plants, and their expression patterns relate to genes for theanine biosynthesis.
CAS Kunming Institute of Botany solves tea genome