The Tea Plant Genome

The tea plant is a cross-pollinated, self-incompatible, high heterozygosity, very large genome (~3.2 Gb) which have greatly hindered research and breeding in this crop. In the recent years, modern genetic and genomic tools have contributed to the development of significant valuable resources for the tea genetic improvement.

This book is of interest to teachers, tea researchers, tea breeders and tea lovers. Also, the book serves as additional reading material for undergraduate and graduate students of agriculture, forestry, horticulture, beverage plant sciences.

1.Tea plant: A millennia-old cash crop for a healthy and happy life worldwide.- 2. Botany, taxonomy of tea (Camellia sinensis, Theaceae) and its relatives.- 3. The main quality and functional chemical composition of tea.- 4. Tea genetic resources: diversity and conservation.- 5. Classic genetics and traditional breeding of tea plant.- 6. Tea plant genetic transformation and gene function research techniques.- 7. Achievements and prospects of QTL mapping and beneficial genes and alleles mining for important quality and agronomic traits in tea plant (Camellia sinensis).- 8. Achievements and prospects of QTL mapping and beneficial genes and alleles mining for important quality and agronomic traits in tea plant (Camellia sinensis).- 9. Genome assembly of tea plants (Camellia spp.).- 10. Genomic variation and adaptative evolution of tea plants.- 11. Tea plant chloroplast and mitochondrial genome.- 12. Transcriptomics for tea plants.- 13. Metabolomics of tea plants.- 14. Proteomics for tea plant.- 15. Small RNA and DNA methylation of tea plants.- 16. Abiotic resistance of tea plant in the functional genomic era.- 17. Response and resistance mechanisms of tea plants to biotic stress.- 18. Development and utilization of high-density genome-wide SNP array for tea plants.- 19. Tea plant genomic, transcriptomic and metabolic databases.- 20. Future perspectives in the omics era for tea breeding.

Dr. Liang Chen is a world-renowned professor in the Tea Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (TRICAAS) located at Hangzhou, China. He has extensive research experience in tea germplasm, genetics, breeding and genomics, etc. Liang received PhD on Tea Science from Zhejiang University, China and had postdoctoral research from Cornell University, USA. He visited Ehime University in Japan, University of Florence in Italy and Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands as senior visiting professor, respectively. Dr. Liang Chen has been appointed three times as Honorary Scientist and Advisor of the Rural Development Administration of the Republic of Korea. He has been the curator of the world’s largest collection of tea genetic resources, National Tea Germplasm Repository at Hangzhou for 20 years and bred 3 dozens of national released and Plant Variety Protection covered tea cultivars for the tea industry.

Dr. Jie-Dan Chen is an associate professor on tea genomics, genetics, and databases in the Tea Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (TRICAAS) located at Hangzhou, China. He has constructed a comprehensive database of genomic variations for molecular breeding in tea plants (TeaGVD).