ABSTRACT: To investigate the relationships between hormones and critical components in tea leaves during withering process, we detected the alterations of abscisic acid (ABA), salicylic acid (SA), and jasmonic acid (JA), catechins, theanine, and caffeine in tea leaves withered at different time points from 0 to 24 hours. The content of ABA increased from 0h to 9h and decreased thereafter and JA content continuous increased, however, SA content was no significantly changes during withering process. Except for gallocatechin (GC) and epicatechin (EC), the contents of other critical components were significantly reduced at 24h. Transcriptome analysis shown that compared with 0h, a total of 2,256, 3,654, and 1,275 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified at 9h, 15h, and 24h, respectively. The pathways of“Phenylalanine, tyrosine and tryptophan biosynthesis”, and “Phenylalanine metabolism” involved in biosynthesis of catechins were enriched significantly with DEGs of all comparisons. Weighted correlation network analysis (WGCNA) of co-expression genes indicated that many of modules were correlated with a specific trait only, however, the darkolivegreen module were correlated with two traits ABA and theanine during withering process. Our study indicates that withering induced dramatic alteration of the gene transcription, hormones (ABA, JA, and SA) and important components, and ABA may regulate theanine matebolism during this process.
