Coffee Bean Gene Mapped

brian6string writes "According to this article at ABC News Online (Australia), scientists in (where else?) Brazil say they have created the first complete map of the genetic structure of the coffee plant and Brazil's Agriculture Minister says the country will now work to develop a 'super coffee.'"

Comments

Hmmm

[Otter]

Bloomberg has a story that's less cutesy but more interesting. Some excerpts:

``This a jump of at least two decades in the race to unlock the coffee genome,'' Brazilian Agriculture Minister Roberto Rodrigues said in a statement on his ministry's Web site.

A two-year government project studied 200,000 sequences of coffee DNA and identified 35,000 genes, which in combination give the drink its flavor and aroma, the statement said.

The DNA database will be open to Brazilian companies in about five or six years, and foreign competitors will be able to access patented information on payment of royalties, Clayton Campanhola, the head of Brazilian agricultural research agency Embrapa, was cited by Reuters as telling journalists in Brasilia.

Rodrigues told reporters that Brazil would produce a ``super coffee'' through cross-pollination of coffee plants and not through genetic modification, according to the British Broadcasting Corp.

Brazil has banned the planting and sale of genetically modified crops.

This makes minimal sense to me, although it does explain why the other stories don't mention a publication. They spend two years, it's a jump of two decades, they're done but Brazilian companies can't see the data for five or six years and foreign companies will have to offer royalties? Pardon my cynicism, but what exactly do they have right now? Some shotgun coverage? ESTs?

Meanwhile, this is a few months work for any of the major genome centers. If there's really any commercial value to this, I can't imagine the coffee industry wouldn't just sponsor a publically-available ccommercial genome, like every other major agricultural crop has or will have. No one is going to wait five years and then give Brazil royalties.

Re:Hmmm... I just rtfa

[Froze]

Note carefully what I said..."exact same result"

I am not advocating gene splicing from other organisms etc. All I find odd is that if you apply cross breeding and get gene sequence 'gattaca' it is OK, but if you use tweezers and knives and get gene sequence 'gattaca' it is evil.

Re:Hmmm... I just rtfa

[Anonymous Coward]

All I find odd is that if you apply cross breeding and get gene sequence 'gattaca' it is OK, but if you use tweezers and knives and get gene sequence 'gattaca' it is evil.

Many people think one is more dangerous than the other. For me good and evil doesn't come into play at that point. You need people for good and evil.

For example sneaking GM corn into the American food supply without the majority of Americans knowing is evil. Creating the GM corn isn't.

Re:obvious mod

[payslee]

True, you can die from caffeine, and it has happened. Probably seven years ago, when I lived in Boston, there was a widely publicized case of an MIT student who OD'd on NoDoze, after taking some unbelievable amount on a dare. Most of the talk was that MIT students should know better, and it interested me as anecdotal proof that intelligence and common sense do not necessarily equate.

Re:Disingenuous Lying

[Sgt York]

generate combinations that are tuned to live in harmony with their environment

That s not really right. On an individual scale, natural selection does not seek harmony with the environment. Natural selection seeks nothing, and tunes to nothing except the amplification of oneself. Organisms do not seek to live in harmony with the environment, they seek to exploit it the best they can. The environment (i.e., the other organisms around it) counter this by trying to exploit each other in the same manner. This is natural selection. Selective breeding accelerates this process drastically.

Where a gene may provide a benefit that will increase its frequency over a period of several thousand years under the influence of natural selection, selective breeding can do it in a century or less. Selective breeding is far from a natural process. Selective breeding acts on one species, and accelerates the selection in that species for a given trait or set if traits. The surrounding species (the environment) do not experience the same increase in rate.Remember; I am not comparing GM to natural selection, but to selective breeding.

if breeding created a more hardy competitor, don't you think nature would have created it by now over the 4.5 billion years it's been at work?

This should be fairly obvious, but it has resulted in a hardier competitor. Many, many times. That's evolution. And simply stating that something is "flat out destructive" does not make it so. I'm not saying that GM is de facto safe, just that it's not by default unsafe, either. In fact, the resarch that has been done points to "safe".

Also, I can't think of a single mechanism other than improved hardiness that would cause an organism to be destructive. Otherwise, it wouldn't be able to compete with indigenous species and would be wiped out.