An enhancer-transposable element from purple leaf tea varieties underlies the transition from evergreen to purple leaf color

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The tea plant (Camellia sinensis) is an evergreen species. Past breeding efforts have created purple leaf tea varieties with enhanced health benefits, such as ‘Zijuan’ (C. sinensis var. assamica cv. Zijuan [ZJ]) (Figure 1A). To understand the mechanisms underlying the purple trait, the genome of ZJ was assembled using PacBio and Hi-C technologies (Figure 1B). The assembled genome size is approximately 3.06 Gb, comprising 1344 scaffolds with a scaffold N50 size of approximately 214.76 Mb (Supplemental Table 1).