Variation of Major Chemical Composition in Seed-Propagated Population of Wild Cocoa Tea Plant Camellia ptilophylla Chang

Abstract

Excessive intake of high-caffeine tea will induce health-related risk. Therefore, breeding and cultivating tea cultivars with less caffeine is a feasible way to control daily caffeine intake. Cocoa tea (Camellia ptilophylla Chang) is a wild tea plant which grows leaves with little or no caffeine. However, the vegetative propagation of cocoa tea plants is difficult due to challenges with rooting. Whether natural seeds collected from wild cocoa tea plants can be used to produce less-caffeinated tea remains unknown, because research on the separation of traits among the seed progeny population is lacking. The present study was set to investigate the variation of caffeine and other chemical compositions in seed-propagated plant individuals using colorimetric and HPLC methods. It shows that there were great differences in chemical composition among the seed-propagated population of wild cocoa tea plants, among which some individuals possessed caffeine contents as high as those of normal cultivated tea cultivars (C. sinensis), suggesting that the naturally seed-propagated cocoa tea seedlings are not suitable for directly cultivating leaf materials to produce low-caffeine tea. Therefore, the cocoa tea plants used for harvesting seeds for growing low-caffeine tea plants should be isolated in order to prevent their hybridization with normal cultivated C. sinensis plants. Interestingly, the leaves of cocoa tea seedlings contained high levels of gallocatechin gallate (GCG) and would be a good source of leaf materials for extracting more stable antioxidant, because GCG is a more stable antioxidant than epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), the dominant component of catechins in normal cultivated tea cultivars. Some plant individuals which contained low levels of caffeine along with high levels of amino acids and medium levels of catechins, are considered to be promising for further screening of less-caffeinated green tea cultivars.

'Nine Steaming Nine Sun‐drying' processing enhanced properties of Polygonatum kingianum against inflammation, oxidative stress and hyperglycemia

“…In addition, we found that biological activities of identified key metabolites that were enriched by NSND processing have consistently been proved in previous studies, 28,52,55,57,65,67,73‐78 supporting our findings (Table 3). Among them, gallocatechin and furoaloesone showed the largest binding energy with most of the targeted proteins.…”

Prediction of Tea Varieties’ “Suitable for People” Relationship: Based on the InteractE-SE+GCN Model

“…In this section, the experimental results obtained in this study are discussed and compared with the results of other studies. Some of the excellent work on tea includes the following publications: P Olha et al [38] studied the positive antioxidant and anti-diabetic effects of tea polyphenols on tea drinkers, P Chen et al [39] conducted a study to analyse the cultivation suitability of tea trees, J Ye et al [40] studied the effects of applying different amounts of organic fertilisers on tea yield and quality, and XQ Zheng et al [41] studied the effects of tea plant chemical composition. Unlike previous work, this study used a link prediction algorithm to link multiple types of tea and tea-suitable people, combining some of the characteristics of tea and using an improved link prediction algorithm for the predictive analysis of tea-suitable people.…”