Tea

Abstract

Tea is not only the most important nonalcoholic beverage drinks worldwide, but also an important “health drink”. It is served as morning drink for a two‐third of world populace daily. Although conventional breeding and propagation contributed significantly in the last several decades for varietal improvement, due to the limitations of conventional breeding, application of biotechnology becomes an alternative approach. Further, its long life cycle, self‐incompatibility, and high inbreeding depression limit its genetic improvement either via the selection of elites from existing natural populations or by the development of biclonal hybrids. With the era of genomics, several genes from tea and its wild genera have been cloned. Thus genetic transformation of tea is important to overcome the limitations of breeding with the assistance of genomics for increasing productivity with lower cost of production, a need of tea industry today. The present report deals with in‐depth progress of various aspects of genetic transformation from tea and related genera, which will be a valuable information for the workers working on various aspects of Camellia biotechnology.