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Annual Review of Food Science and Technology

Volume 16, 2025

A Comprehensive Understanding of Tea Metabolome: From Tea Plants to Processed Teas

  • N.H.M. Rubel Mozumder1, Jang-Eun Lee2,3 and Young-Shick Hong4
  • 1Department of Food Science and Nutrition, Faculty of Engineering, Hajee Mohammad Danesh Science and Technology University, Dinajpur, Bangladesh; email: [email protected] 2Fermentation Convergence Research Group, Food Convergence Research Division, Korea Food Research Institute, Wanju-Gun, Republic of Korea; email: [email protected] 3Department of Food Biotechnology, University of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Republic of Korea 4Division of Food and Nutrition, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, Republic of Korea; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 16:379-402 (Volume publication date April 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on January 28, 2025
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

Tea () is one of the most popular nonalcoholic beverages in the world, second only to water. Six main types of teas are produced globally: green, white, black, oolong, yellow, and Pu-erh. Each type has a distinctive taste, quality, and cultural significance. The health-promoting effects of tea are attributed to the complex metabolite compositions present in tea leaves. These metabolite compositions vary in response to different factors. In addition to manufacturing processes in processed tea, the primary factors influencing variations of fresh tea leaf metabolites include genetics, cultivation management, and environmental conditions. Metabolomics approaches, coupled with high-throughput statistical analysis, offer promising tools for the comprehensive identification and characterization of tea leaf metabolites according to growing conditions, cultivation practices, manufacturing processes, seasonality, climate, cultivars, and geography. This review highlights the distinctive variations in fresh tea leaf metabolites, which change in response to various factors, using a metabolomics approach, which are also extended to various processed teas.

Keyword(s): environmental factors, fresh tea leaves, metabolomics, processed tea, tea cultivar, tea grade
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2025-04-28
2025-06-24
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/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-food-111523-121252
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A Comprehensive Understanding of Camellia sinensis Tea Metabolome: From Tea Plants to Processed Teas
Annual Review of Food Science and Technology 16, 379 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-food-111523-121252
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-food-111523-121252
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-food-111523-121252
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