Deep sequencing of the Camellia sinensis transcriptome revealed candidate genes for major metabolic pathways of tea-specific compounds.

Background: Tea is one of the most popular non-alcoholic beverages worldwide. However, the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, is difficult to culture in vitro, to transform, and has a large genome, rendering little genomic information available. Recent advances in large-scale RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) provide a fast, cost-effective, and reliable approach to generate large expression datasets for functional genomic analysis, which is especially suitable for non-model species with un-sequenced genomes.