A systemic view of microbial ecology in spontaneous fermentation of Chinese traditional pu-erh tea

To study the microbial functions, metaproteomes were extracted from 36 samples of fermented tea leaves and subjected to LC-MS/MS analyses. The MS/MS data were searched against the UniProt-protein database of the dominant microorganisms in the sample as identified by previous meta-barcoding analysis. In total, 5442479 microbial proteins, including amine oxidase, aminopeptidase, carboxypeptidase and catalase, were identified in each sample.