Lola Gayle, STEAM Register
Earlier this week, the J. M. Smucker Company dropped a bombshell on coffee lovers in the United States when it announced a six percent price hike on its packaged coffee products sold under the Folgers, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Café Bustelo brand names.
The company blames the move on sustained increases in green coffee costs. However, for some reason, the company’s K-Cup pods were excluded from the price increase.
Thankfully, this bombshell was followed by a bit of good news on Friday — if you’re into the science side of things, that is. That’s when researchers at the University of California, Davis, released the first public genome sequence for Coffea arabica, the species responsible for more than 70 percent of global coffee production.
According to a statement from the university, this genome sequence is particularly meaningful for California, where coffee plants are being grown commercially for the first time in the continental United States.
The new genome sequence also contains information that will help in the development of disease-resistant coffee varieties that can adapt to the climate changes that are expected to threaten global coffee production in the next 30 years, according to Juan Medrano, a geneticist in the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and co-researcher on the sequencing effort.
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“We hope that the C. arabica sequence will eventually benefit everyone involved with coffee — from coffee farmers, whose livelihoods are threatened by devastating diseases like coffee leaf rust, to coffee processors and consumers around the world,” he said.
Medrano, who is actually an animal geneticist, conducted the sequencing with the help of plant scientists Allen Van Deynze and Dario Cantu, and postdoctoral research scholar Amanda Hulse-Kemp, all from UC Davis.
Now, this isn’t the first time a coffee genome has been sequenced. In 2014, researchers sequenced the genome of Coffea canephora, which is commonly referred to as robusta coffee and used for making coffee blends and instant coffee. There has been, however, no publicly accessible genome sequence for the higher-value and more genetically complex C. arabica.
For the study, the research team worked with farmer Jay Ruskey, who with the help of University of California Cooperative Extension farm advisor Mark Gaskell, was growing the first commercial coffee plants in the continental United States at his Good Land Organics farm north of Santa Barbara.
NOTE: In the course of my research, I learned that Good Land Organics also grows “caviar limes” — a micro-citrus native to Australia. According to their website, this small fruit is certified organic and the flesh has a distinct lime flavor once popped open. Neat!
It might seem weird to attempt to grow a tropical crop so far north of the equator. However, coffee trees at Ruskey’s Central Coast farm — located at a latitude about 19 degrees north of any other commercial coffee plantations — are already producing high-quality coffee beans. Ruskey is also attempting to achieve the same results on about 20 other farms stretching from San Luis Obispo south to San Diego.
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A Geisha coffee tree growing at Good Land Organics. Credit: UC Davis
The research team settled on sequencing the genome from a single Geisha (or Gesha) coffee tree growing at Good Land Organics. Geisha is a high-value C. arabica variety that originated in the mountains of western Ethiopia and is known for its unique aromatic qualities. This variety was planted in the 1950s as a rust-resistant crop and rediscovered in the early 2000s.
NOTE: C. arabica is a hybrid cross derived from two other plant species: C. canephora (robusta coffee), and the closely related C. eugenioides. As a result of that hybrid crossing, C. arabica’s complex genome has four sets of chromosomes — unlike many other plants and humans, which have only two chromosome sets.
According to the university statement, the researchers found that the Geisha genome is made up of roughly 1.19 billion base pairs — about one-third that of the human genome — and contains an estimated 70,830 predicted genes.
They have also sequenced samples from 22 other Geisha coffee trees to learn more about the genetic variation within that variety and among 13 other C. arabica varieties, which will also be important for developing plants that can resist disease and cope with other environmental stresses.
And, going forward, the researchers hope to identify genes and molecular pathways associated with coffee quality, in hopes that these will provide a better understanding of the flavor profiles of Geisha coffee.
Now available for immediate use by scientists and plant breeders around the world, the new genome sequence has been posted to Phytozome.net. Details of the sequence will be presented Sunday, Jan. 15, at the Plant and Animal Genome Conference in San Diego.
The History of Coffee: According to legend, human cultivation of coffee began after goats in Ethiopia were seen mounting each other after eating the leaves and fruits of the coffee tree. In Ethiopia, people in some locales still drink a herbal tea made from the leaves of the coffee tree. Continue reading…
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