ABSTRACT: Tea quality is primarily determined by the accumulation of specialized metabolites in fresh leaves; however, the mechanisms by which propagation methods influence tea qual-ity through plant–soil–microbiome interactions remain poorly understood. Here, sexually propagated (SR) and asexually propagated (AR) tea plants were comparatively investi-gated by integrating soil physicochemical analyses, leaf physiological assessments, wide-ly targeted metabolomics, and rhizosphere metagenomic profiling. Compared with AR, SR significantly improved soil nutrient availability, characterized by higher soil organic matter, nitrogen, and phosphorus contents, and promoted the accumulation of key quali-ty-related components, including tea polyphenols and soluble sugars. In particular, tea polyphenol content increased by 58.8%, while available phosphorus increased by 161.5% under SR conditions. SR also exhibited enhanced antioxidant capacity, as evidenced by elevated superoxide dismutase, peroxidase, and indole-3-acetic acid oxidase activities while maintaining hydrogen peroxide homeostasis. Metabolomic analysis revealed dis-tinct metabolic reprogramming between propagation types, with differential metabolites significantly enriched in flavonoid biosynthesis, phenolic acid metabolism, caffeine me-tabolism, and α-linolenic acid metabolism pathways. Concurrently, metagenomic analyses demonstrated that SR reshaped rhizosphere microbial communities by enriching Actino-mycetota, Pseudomonadota, and Planctomycetota and altering microbial functional pro-files associated with central carbon metabolism, including glycolysis and the tricarboxylic acid cycle. Integrated microbiome–metabolome analyses further revealed significant asso-ciations between several SR-enriched microbial taxa and quality-related metabolites, par-ticularly flavonoids and phenolic acids. These correlations indicate coordinated variation between rhizosphere microbial composition and leaf metabolic profiles but do not estab-lish a directional or causal relationship.strong positive associations between SR-enriched microbial taxa and quality-related metabolites, particularly flavonoids and phenolic acids, suggesting a close coupling between rhizosphere microbial functions and leaf metabolic reprogramming. Collectively, our findings indicate that propagation strategy is associated with coordinated changes in soil nutrient availability, rhizosphere microbial car-bon-cycling functions, plant physiological regulation, and metabolite accumulation. Alt-hough these findings support a close association between propagation strategy and tea quality-related traits, they do not establish direct causal relationships.demonstrate that propagation method acts as an important driver of tea quality formation by coordinating soil nutrient availability, rhizosphere microbial carbon-cycling functions, plant physio-logical regulation, and metabolite accumulation. These multi-omics associations support a Soil–Microbiome–Metabolome framework for interpreting propagation-related variation in tea quality. However, the present comparative design and correlation analyses do not es-tablish direct causal relationships among these components.This study provides mul-ti-omics evidence for a soil–microbiota–metabolome coupling mechanism underlying propagation method-dependent tea quality formation and highlights the potential of sex-ual propagation as a strategy for producing high-quality tea.
