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Chemical profiling of ancient bud black tea with a focus on the effects of shoot maturity and fermentation by UHPLC-HRMS

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Abstract

Ancient bud black tea (ABBT) is a special kind of black tea (BT) made from the bud of ancient tea tree. However, there is limited information about its chemical composition and the effects of shoot maturity and fermentation. By UHPLC-HRMS, 208 compounds including catechins, flavonoids, phenolic acids, alkaloids and others were qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed in ABBT. By comparison with traditional BT made from one bud with multiple leaves, it was suggested that the shoot maturity has great effects on the chemical profile of BT. Most of the detected compounds exhibited lower content in ABBT, while only a little number of compounds (e.g., theaflavin-3′-gallate, theaflavin-3-gallate, theaflavin-3,3′-gallate, quercitrin, isoquercitrin, and quinic acid) showed significantly higher contents in ABBT. During fermentation, the contents of these compounds varied obviously but with inconsistent trends. Simple catechins (e.g., EC, EGCG), dimers of catechins and their derivatives (e.g., prodelphinidin B2) showed an inconsistent decreasing trend, while oxidative polymerization products such as theaflavin-3,3′-gallate and theasinensin A showed a continuous increasing trend of content. Additionally, the contents of free phenolic acids, flavonoids, caffeine and amino acids showed a decreasing trend of content, while acylated phenolic acids exhibited an opposite trend. As a result, this work revealed the chemical profile of ABBT and enhanced our understanding with respect to the effects of shoot maturity and fermentation.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Mr. Kanlong Yan in Zhanglang ancient village for helping us in collection of tea samples.

Funding

This work is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of PR China (Grant no. 21775058) and the Applied Basic Research Project of Yunnan Province (No. 2018FD033).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Food Science and Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, 650500, People’s Republic of China

    Yonglin Li, Ning Chen, Wenting Li, Huaqiao Lou, Yan Li, Qian Xiong, Ruoxue Bai, Jintao Wang, Yongdan Hu, Dabing Ren & Lunzhao Yi

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  1. Yonglin Li
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  2. Ning Chen
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  3. Wenting Li
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Contributions

DR, LY, YH: conceptualization, methodology, supervision, and project administration. YL: data curation, writing-original draft, writing-review and editing, visualization. NC: investigation, data curation, and writing-original draft. WL, HL, YL, QX, RB, JW: visualization, and investigation.

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Correspondence to Dabing Ren or Lunzhao Yi.

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Li, Y., Chen, N., Li, W. et al. Chemical profiling of ancient bud black tea with a focus on the effects of shoot maturity and fermentation by UHPLC-HRMS. Eur Food Res Technol 248, 1379–1393 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00217-022-03972-6

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