Metabolomics of Green Tea

Tea (Camellia sinensis L.) is a popular beverage worldwide, and because of its possible health effects, it has received considerable attention as a medicinal herb. Unfermented green tea constituents show various biological and pharmacological activities. Recently, metabolomic approaches to study the functionality and quality of tea are becoming more common place. One such metabolomic approach, metabolic profiling, can provide information on the relationships between the metabolome and factors such as phenotype or quality. Mass spectrometry (MS) and proton nuclear magnetic resonance (1H-NMR) spectroscopy combined with multivariate statistical analyses are employed for tea metabolomic studies. The highlighted topics are divided into three sections: (1) tea chemical composition, (2) metabolic responses to tea consumption, and (3) biotransformation of dietary tea components. In this chapter, we describe the latest metabolomic techniques applicable to new avenues of tea research.