To elucidate the overall proteomic responses of tea leaves, we performed a heatmap approach by using mean centered and standard deviation scaled with The Unscrambler (Version 10.0.1, Camo Software Inc., Woodbridge, NJ, USA) for the normalization of the values to give all variables an equal chance. After normalization of all the data sets, normalized values were used in the color scales system from Microsoft Office Excel 2010 (Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, USA) to generate the heatmap.
The normalized data set was used for the principal component analysis (PCA) by performing normalized volume of the differentially abundant protein spots using The Unscrambler (version 10.0.1, Camo Software Inc., Woodbridge, NJ, USA). The PCA loading plots were used to determine the separation of the differentially expressed proteins based on the presence and absence between TPL and MGL samples. The PCA loading plots were performed in triplicate (n = 3).