背景回顾：The tea plant (Camellia sinensis) presents an excellent system to study evolution and diversification of the numerous classes, types and variable contents of specialized metabolites.

主要研究：Here, we investigate the relationship among C. sinensis phylogenetic groups and specialized metabolites using transcriptomic and metabolomic data on the fresh leaves collected from 136 representative tea accessions in China.

结果1-SNP树：We obtain 925,854 high-quality single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) enabling the refined grouping of the sampled tea accessions into five major clades.

结果2-代谢组：Untargeted metabolomic analysesdetect 129 and 199 annotated metabolites that are differentially accumulated in different tea groups in positive and negative ionization modes, respectively.

结果3-类群特异代谢物：Each phylogenetic group contains signature metabolites. In particular, CSA tea accessions are featured with high accumulation of diverse classes of flavonoid compounds, such as flavanols, flavonol mono-/di-glycosides, proanthocyanidin dimers, and phenolic acids.

结论：Our results provide insights into the genetic and metabolite diversity and are useful for accelerated tea plant breeding.

 摘  要 

茶树（Camellia sinensis）是一个非常理想的系统，用来研究不同种类、类别以及含量变异的特化代谢物的演化和多样化。本文中，作者基于来自中国136份茶树种质资源材料的叶片转录组和代谢组，研究了不同茶树演化枝和特化代谢物之间的关系。作者基于925,854个高质量的SNPs将这些茶树样本归类于五大类群。非靶向代谢组分析在正、负电离模式下，分别检测到了129和199个不同茶树类群之间差异积累的代谢物。每个茶树类群都包含比较特异的代谢物。尤其是，CSA茶树材料具有比较高水平的类黄酮化合物，包括黄烷醇、黄酮醇单/双糖苷、原花青素二聚体以及酚酸。本文的结果为茶树的遗传和代谢多样性提供了新的视野，并且有助于未来的茶树育种改良。

 通讯作者