Tea is a traditional beverage in China, which has a variety of health effects. Recently, scientists from the Research Center for Plants and Human Health, Institute of Urban Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, has published a review paper in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition to introduce the recent research advance on the refined extraction techniques of tea polyphenols (TPs).The title of the paper is “Current extraction, purification, and identification techniques of tea polyphenols: An updated review”.

TPs are important bioactive compounds in tea leaves, which mainly include catechins, anthocyanins, flavanones, and phenolic acids, accounting for about 1/4 of the dry weight of tea leaves. Owing to the health benefits of TPs, commercial tea beverages containing higher contents of TPs. In addition, TPs exert great potential to be developed into functional foods. The development of TPs-rich beverages and TPs-incorporated functional food products is reliant on extraction and purification technologies. Therefore, to provide a comprehensive review of the extraction, purification, and identification of TPs, related literature mainly published in the past 10 years was collected from Web of Science and Scopus databases.

This review paper summarized the main conventional and novel techniques for the extraction of tea polyphenols, and intensively discussed and compared their advantages and disadvantages. In general, it provides a research basis for the green and efficient extraction, purification, and identification of tea polyphenols, which can facilitate their utilization in the production of various functional food products and nutraceuticals.

More details can be found at the link below:：https://doi.org/10.1080/10408398.2021.1995843

By Gan Renyou (ganrenyou@caas.cn)