About State Key Laboratory of Tea Plant Biology and Utilization

State Key Laboratory of Tea Plant Biology and Utilization

The State Key Laboratory of Tea Plant Biology and Utilization is a national research laboratory at Anhui Agricultural University, 130 West Changjiang Road, Hefei, Anhui Province, China. It was approved on 20 January 2015 as a state key laboratory jointly established by the Ministry of Science and Technology and Anhui Province, and it carries forward a tea-science tradition at the university that traces to a 1939 programme founded by the renowned tea scientists Wang Zenong and Chen Chuan. Its research is organised around four directions: tea germplasm evaluation and creation, secondary metabolism and regulation, breeding techniques and variety development, and tea processing and high-value utilisation. In December 2024 a reorganised successor, the National Key Laboratory of Tea Germplasm Innovation and Resource Utilization, was approved on its foundation; this profile describes the laboratory under its long-attested state key laboratory name and records the reorganisation as its most recent chapter.

Origins: The Cradle of Tea Science Education in China

Tea science is a traditional strength of Anhui Agricultural University. The laboratory's own institutional history, published on its official site, traces its origin to the Tea Specialty Program founded in 1939 within the College of Agriculture of Fudan University, which made it the cradle of tea science education in China. The laboratory developed from the tea science laboratory founded by Professors Wang Zenong and Chen Chuan, two of the founding figures of modern Chinese tea science. That lineage matters to the institution's identity: the laboratory presents itself not as a new creation of 2015 but as the national-level elevation of a teaching and research line that has run continuously since 1939, through the careers of the scientists who first established tea as an academic discipline in China.

Path to State Key Laboratory Status

The laboratory's approvals mark a steady climb through China's laboratory system. It was successively approved as a Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in 1997, a key laboratory of Anhui Province in 1998, and a Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Education in 2003. On 20 January 2015 it was approved as a State Key Laboratory jointly established by the Ministry of Science and Technology and Anhui Province — the province-ministry co-construction route by which a strong provincial research base gains national status. In November 2016 the Ministry of Education approved the establishment of an International Joint Laboratory on Tea Chemistry and Health associated with it, and in March 2018 it became one of the first ten Anhui Provincial Laboratories. Each step added a layer — agricultural ministry, province, education ministry, then national status, international joint research and provincial-laboratory standing — to a single research community in Hefei.

Research Direction One: Tea Germplasm Evaluation and Creation

The first research direction concerns the tea plant's genetic resources: evaluating the germplasm held in collections — the landraces, cultivars and wild relatives of Camellia sinensis — and creating new germplasm from it. Germplasm is the raw material of all breeding, and tea, a perennial crop with extensive genetic diversity, holds much of its breeding potential in the variation among its traditional varieties and wild relatives. The laboratory's work in this direction supports its central modern achievement, highlighted in its institutional reporting: over ten years it drew the world's first high-quality tea plant genome map. A reference genome transforms germplasm work, because accessions can then be characterised genetically rather than by appearance alone, and the genes behind flavour, aroma, stress tolerance and yield traits can be located within the diversity the collections hold.

Research Direction Two: Secondary Metabolism and Regulation

The second direction studies secondary metabolism — the biochemical pathways that produce the compounds making tea tea: the catechins and other polyphenols behind astringency and health interest, the amino acid theanine behind savoury taste, caffeine, and the volatiles behind aroma. Researchers affiliated with the laboratory work, among other topics, on theanine metabolism and transport, the epigenetic regulation of secondary metabolism, nutrient use efficiency, and the function of secondary metabolites in plant-environment interactions. Published laboratory-community research illustrates the physiological side of the same programme: a study of mesophyll potassium maintenance and plasma membrane H+-ATPase regulation showed how tea plants preserve potassium homeostasis under drought and rehydration — drought being one of the main factors limiting tea yield — while metabolomics studies of famous teas such as Lu'an Guapian track how harvest timing, including the Grain Rain period, transforms quality through changing metabolites. Together the work links the cup — taste, aroma and quality — back through chemistry to the genes and growing conditions that produce it.

Research Direction Three: Breeding Techniques and Variety Development

The third direction turns germplasm and metabolic knowledge into new tea varieties and the techniques to breed them faster and more precisely. Tea breeding is slow by nature: the plant is a long-lived perennial, and a new variety must be tested across years and environments before release. The laboratory's institutional record reports that it has bred and registered seven national-level new tea plant varieties. Combined with the genome map and the germplasm programme, variety development at the laboratory represents the applied end of its basic science: characterised diversity, understood chemistry and modern breeding technique converging on cultivars for the tea regions the laboratory serves.

Research Direction Four: Tea Processing and High-Value Utilisation

The fourth direction covers what happens after the leaf is picked: tea processing and the high-value utilisation of tea resources. Its flagship achievements, as reported by the university, are in processing technology — the key technologies and equipment the laboratory developed for automated green tea processing and digital quality control broke foreign technological monopolies, applying automated, digitally controlled manufacture to a product traditionally dependent on manual judgement. High-value utilisation extends tea beyond the traditional beverage into deeper processing and new products. The laboratory has been granted more than 200 national invention patents, a figure that reflects this applied, equipment-and-process side of its work alongside its publications.

Standards and National Recognition

The laboratory has played a leading role in setting the standards by which tea is classified and traded. It led the formulation of four ISO international standards, including "Tea — Classification" and "Tea — Chemical Classification", and its reporting states that this reversed the passive situation of China lacking leadership in the formulation of international tea standards — a significant point for the world's historic tea homeland and a leading tea exporter. It has also formulated or revised four national standards. Its honours include one Second Prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award and three First Prizes of the Anhui Provincial Science and Technology Award. It has led 172 projects at provincial and ministerial level and above in recent years, led the release of the world's first tea industry large model, and has been selected as an innovation team under the Ministry of Education's Innovation Team Development Plan and as a National Huang Danian-Style Teachers' Team; in 2026 the All-China Federation of Trade Unions named it a National Workers' Pioneer Team, one of the highest honours for advanced collectives.

Service to the Tea Industry

The laboratory has built a nationwide tea industry science and technology service network integrating production, learning, research and application, providing key support for the high-quality development of the tea industry in Anhui, Yunnan, Shaanxi, Chongqing, Henan, Hubei and Tibet, according to the university's reporting. Staffing under its reorganised national form stands at 152 permanent members, including 133 with senior professional titles, 12 national-level talents and 14 scientists of the China Tea Industry Technology System, including one chief scientist. The laboratory thus functions simultaneously as a basic-research institute, a standards-setter, a breeding and processing-technology developer, and a technical service hub for tea-producing provinces across China.

Reorganisation into the National Key Laboratory

In 2024, relying on Anhui Agricultural University and based on the State Key Laboratory of Tea Plant Biology and Utilization jointly established by the ministry and the province, the laboratory completed national key laboratory reorganisation in collaboration with the Tea Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Hunan Agricultural University. In December 2024 it was approved as the National Key Laboratory of Tea Germplasm Innovation and Resource Utilization — a name that puts germplasm innovation, the first of its four research directions, at the centre of the reorganised institution. The reorganised laboratory states its ambitions as building a new highland of world-class basic theory in tea science, a main front for talent aggregation and cultivation, a source of scientific and technological innovation and achievement transformation, and a centre for international exchange and cooperation, creating a national strategic scientific and technological force for the tea industry.

Place in Chinese Tea Science

Few Chinese laboratories carry a lineage as long as this one's: from the 1939 tea specialty programme of Wang Zenong and Chen Chuan, through ministerial and provincial key laboratories, to state key laboratory status in 2015 and national reorganisation in 2024. Its record spans the whole tea chain — the world's first high-quality tea plant genome map, four ISO international standards, seven national-level varieties, more than 200 invention patents, automated green-tea processing technology and a service network across seven tea regions. From its base at 130 West Changjiang Road in Hefei, the State Key Laboratory of Tea Plant Biology and Utilization, and the national key laboratory reorganised from it, stand as China's national centre for the biology and utilisation of the tea plant.