Scientists Grow Decaffeinated Coffee Plants

An anonymous reader writes "According to a CBC News story, researchers have genetically modified coffee seedlings to produce up to 70 per cent less caffeine." The Japanese researchers quoted in the article say "..demand for decaffeinated coffee is growing worldwide. Caffeine can trigger palpitations, increase blood pressure and disrupt sleep in sensitive people", and so "..used a tool called RNA interference to genetically engineer the one-year-old plants." Seems like these boffins may be competing against the University Of Hawaii researchers we mentioned last year to take away your buzz.

Comments

For reference...

[brucmack]

For reference, here's a summary of some current decaffeination processes. An excerpt:

"Coffee is decaffeinated using a variety of processes. All of which are relatively harmless to your health, but harmful to the beverage quality."

Whats wrong with current Decaf?

[Benm78]

Besides the fact that it lacks caffeine, and tastes mediocre at best, I wonder what the problem is with currect decaf.

Decaf is nowadays produced by removing caffeine from coffee beans using liquid or supercritical CO2, instead of organic solvents used in the old days. The current process is friendly to the environment (CO2 can easily be recycled), and safe to the consumer as well.

Personally, I do not object genetic modification of the plants, but I think many people (especially Europeans) do. Decaf is also considered a 'healthy' product, and it might be a bad marketing match to introduce modern biotech there. Furthermore, I doubt it will taste any better, since caffeine itself has a bitter flavor to it that might be important in the taste of 'real' coffee.

One question remains: Where does the caffeine they currently remove go? And: Will caffeine become more expensive when there are no 'leftovers' from removing it from coffee?

Re:Whats wrong with current Decaf?

[CitizenJohnJohn]

Warning: coffee tragic at keyboard.

Short answer: it doesn't taste very good. Even if you're using a good grinder and espresso machine and are a reasonably skilled barista, you can't make espresso or espresso-based drinks from decaf beans that taste as good as ones that start with regular beans. The decaffeination process removes other things from the coffee that go to make up its taste - hardly surprising as a lot of the taste of coffee comes from some fairly light, volatile substances. They don't stick around in the cup for long after espresso is made, so you'd expect them to hitch a ride when the caffeine departs.

As for 'who would drink GM/engineered decaf?' well, my wife for one. She loves coffee, but gets bad effects from the caffeine if she has more than a couple of cappuccinos a day. Okay, I make them strong (there's a double shot of espresso in any coffee served here) but that's how she and everyone else seems to like them, so that's not about to change. If someone came up with a bean strain that tasted good and had even 50 percent of the caffeine content of regular Arabica, we'd be customers, and I know we wouldn't be alone - the roaster I use sells lots of decaf even though he freely admits it doesn't taste great.

That's going to be a challenge for the guys doing this research, by the way. Just about any coffee you get served anywhere is made from a blend of different beans, grown in different places to produce a well-rounded, balanced drink. Even, say, 'Colombian' isn't going to be one bean from one estate. This product is initially going to be, in effect, a single-strain, single-estate coffee. Even if GMing out the caffeine leaves everything else alone, the resulting drink could be, ah, interesting...

Info About Coffee

[bace]

Firstly Coffee is the second most traded comodity, behind oil.

The way most coffee is decafinated these days is with a process called the "Swiss water method".
This involves soaking unroasted coffee beans in water. The water absorbs the coffee flavor and the caffine.
These beans are then trown out, the water is filtered of caffine, and only caffine. To do this the water is pased through a carbon filter.
The result is decaf coffee flavoured water. This water is used to soak a new batch of beans. Scince the water is super saturated with coffee flavour, it cannot abosorb any more flavour, but it can still absorb caffine. So the caffine is removed from the beans whilst keeping the flavour. The water is used for about 3 batches then the whole process starts again with new water.

The extra steps involved in decafinating coffee is what makes it a bit more expensive. So next time you have a decaf coffee, just think of all the steps involved to make it that way. Ohh by the way, coffee needs do be 97% free of caffine to be called decaf.

If you want to know how i know all this, i help roast coffee for Gloria Jeans

Re:It's hardly Genetic Modification

[RDW]

Actually they are GM - the plant cells (in the form of a 'callus') weren't just treated with RNAi, they were modified by permanently inserting a construct that expresses the appropriate RNAi (designed to repress a gene necessary for caffeine synthesis). They then used these cells to produce seedlings with reduced caffeine content which (assuming the insert is stable) will pass this property on to their offspring (even though, as you say, the original gene is still intact).

Just for reference:

[Anonymous Coward]

Gene silencing of this nature in plants is generally referred to as PTGS or Post-Transcriptional Gene Silencing. More recently, as the phenomenon has been observed in organisms from yeast -> humans, it has been renamed RNAi for RNA interference.

Re:Do we really need more Frankenfoods ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Genes are the same as thousands of years ago, expression and selection is just different. We have adapted to them.

I agree with almost everything you say except that bit. The genes of today are not the genes of yesterday. The reason is mutation.