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. 2021 Dec 1;8:253. doi: 10.1038/s41438-021-00679-9

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© The Author(s) 2021

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 1 — As tea is a nonmodel plant species that lacks a well-established genetic transformation system, there has been relatively little epigenetic-related research on this plant. Thus, researchers are faced with many challenges when conducting epigenetic studies on the regulation of secondary metabolism in tea. For example, it is unclear how to verify whether epigenetics is involved in the regulation of secondary metabolism in tea and what the main epigenetic factors involved in the regulation are. In this review, we explore research strategies for investigating the epigenetic control of secondary metabolism in tea on the basis of the genetic characteristics of these plants, focusing on the following two major epigenetic modifications as examples: DNA methylation and histone deacetylation. First, we review epigenetic regulation of plant secondary metabolism and explore the possibility that DNA methylation and histone acetylation are involved in the upstream regulation of key genes of tea quality-related metabolites in tea induced by stress. Second, possible regulatory patterns of DNA methylation and histone acetylation are summarized. Third, a feasible strategy for studying epigenetic regulation of plant secondary metabolism in tea is proposed. The main objective of this review is to summarize research strategies for studying the epigenetic regulation of tea secondary metabolism and providing key epigenetic factors that can be used for future tea genetic breeding.