Taste of your favourite tea may be dependent on specific microbes

Tea and coffee can be two nations, religions, planets and much much more. Lovers of both beverages swear by their allegiances which arestronger than the toughest of bonds. For those who love tea, and for others as well, a new study may sound amusing. While it is generally held that the taste of a particular tea mixture depends on the relative proportion of blends, it appears it also depends on microbes living in the roots of the tea plant.

In this study published in the journal Current Biology, the researchers have also said that by altering the type and proportion of microbes, the properties of a particular tea variety can be altered and the method can be even used to improve quality.

"Significant disparities in microbial communities, particularly nitrogen metabolism-related microorganisms, were identified in the roots of tea plants with varying qualities through microbiomics," saidTongda Xu from Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University in China. Tongda was quoted by Phys[dot]org

"Crucially, through the isolation and assembly of a synthetic microbial community from high-quality tea plant roots, we managed to notably enhance the amino acid content in various tea plant varieties, resulting in an improvement in tea quality."

It is already known that microbes living inside the root of a plant influence nutrient uptake. In the present study, the researchers attempted to find out how this affects the quality of the tea variety.

Researchers reportedly found that microbes in the tea rootthey studied affected the ammonia uptake of the plant. This in turn affected the production of theanine, a compound that determines the taste of a particular tea variety. The researchers also found that there was a difference in the microbes living in the roots of different teas. These varieties had different amounts of theanine.

The researchers identified a set of microbes they found was altering the way nitrogen was metabolised by the plant and was boosting levels of theanine.

The research team created a synthetic community of microbes, which they called SynCom. This microbial community resembled the one found in the roots of a tea variety called Rougui.

This variety has high theanine levels.

It was also found that when SynCom was applied to roots of tea varieties deficient in theanine, it resulted in the variety having higher levels of theanine than usual.

This has the potential to open new vistas in agricultural sciences.

(With inputs from agencies)