Tea plant (Camellia sinensis) is an important commercial crop featuring its numerous and abundant characteristic secondary metabolites, such as theanine, polyphenols, alkaloids, polysaccharides, and vitamins, in tea leaves that serve as source materials of a popular non-alcoholic beverage known as “tea”. To date, only a small fraction of tea characteristic components related genes have been functionally characterized, which put a big obstacle for tea genetic improvement and metabolic engineering. To address this issue, we predicted a high-quality protein functional network for tea plant (TeaPoN), which contained 31,273 functional associations among 6,634 tea proteins, with a giant connected component of 6,143 proteins (92.60% of the tea genome) and a batch of small components of a few proteins. For the three major characteristic secondary metabolites (theanine, caffeine, catechins), the related biosynthetic genes had significant modular property and clear separation among them, which provided an evidence as a prerequisite for the identification of genes related to these characteristic components. Based on this, we presented an easy-to-use web interface for the data deposit and gene screening application of TeaPoN in tea research community.
In TeaPoN portal, tea researchers can submit gene of interest as query using gene ID, gene symbol, or gene name (e.g., TEA010018.1, UGT, 4-Hydroxylase). Demo example is provided for users in this page for easy demonstration. Upon a query by inputting a certain gene, the corresponding module information as well as functional related genes, their IDs, names, locations, and pathways will be returned.