A review on the isolation and structure of tea polysaccharides and their bioactivities

Tea polysaccharides were found to be mostly glycoconjugates in which a protein carries one or more carbohydrate chains covalently attached to a polypeptide backbone, usually via N- or O-linkages. It has been reported that they have showed various bioactivities, such as anti-cancer, anti-HIV, hypoglycemic and immunological activities, and so on. In this paper, the various aspects of the investigation results of tea polysaccharides in the past 20 years were summarized, including the extraction and purification processes, the structure and bioactivities.