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... I just rtfa

[Froze]

They are going to use the mapped gene literally as a map. Since Brazil has banned GMO's the genome will be used as a guide for determining which cross pollinations etc. will be most effective.

So if you modify the genes by natural methods its not GM, but if you use artificial means to accomplish the exact same result, it is GM. God! I love the un-inteeligent masses that find this acceptable.

Re:Hmmm... I just rtfa

[wind]

So if you modify the genes by natural methods its not GM, but if you use artificial means to accomplish the exact same result, it is GM. God! I love the un-inteeligent masses that find this acceptable.

Clarification question: Find GM acceptable or find this supposed confounding acceptable?

Anyway, call me Dr. Stupid, but I think there is a substantive difference between having the means to be really selective about your breeding and splicing genetic code out of one species to put into another.

It seems to me that we are where we are today because clever, patient people "genetically modified" their animals and crops through careful breeding. I don't see how what Brazil is proposing is different. I'm pleased that they'd using this method instead of going in with the high tech equivalent of knives and tweezers to play switcheroo and put genes together in combinations that nature hasn't pre-tested for us.

thinkgeek.com

[Damingo]

So the map of a coffee bean. thinkgeek have already got a caffine molecule on a T-Shirt so how long till they have a genitic map of a coffee bean on a T-Shirt. You saw it here first guys, so i recon that if they do then all /.ers should get a free T! Damingo

Re:obvious mod

[macdaddy357]

Already the inferior bitter tasting species, robusta, has twice as much caffeine as Arabica, the good tasting stuff. Already, a pot of purely robusta will give you the shakes. 20 times more caffeine might be lethal.

Re:Anyone here ever actually HAD brazilian coffee?

[BerntB]

North America doesn't just have the worse beer it seems.

Well, not being an American -- but isn't both of these changing?

Arguably with all the microbreweries the US should have at least as good beer as the average in Europe (except for e.g. the British islands and Belgium).

Then we have the Starbucks revolution. It's a first step, but soon they will have coffee culture, too!

US is on the way to become a civilized place. :-)

Disingenuous Lying

[Red Rocket]

So if you modify the genes by natural methods its not GM, but if you use artificial means to accomplish the exact same result, it is GM. God! I love the un-inteeligent masses that find this acceptable.

This is just blatant "un-inteeligent" propaganda. In order to get the "exact same result" researchers would have to first use selective breeding to get the traits they want, then take the original plant and splice the exact same altered sequences into that plant's DNA. It would simply be looking at how nature would change the genes and duplicating the process. That would be a pointless exercise in reverse engineering rather than genetic engineering and nobody would waste time doing that.

Natural methods create "fact-checked" documents while GM methods create self-replicating potential time bombs. Your understanding of the issue is very shallow.

And I love the way Slashdotty modders love to mod up industry propaganda as "insightful." It happens every time.

Re:Disingenuous Lying

[Red Rocket]

...what do you mean by "fact-checked documents"?

I mean that the DNA (the "document") has been combined in an eons-old method that has been vetted by natural selection to generate combinations that are tuned to live in harmony with their environment. Humans have a poor understanding of the functions and effects of their unnatural DNA tinkering. Breeding keeps natural laws intact for the most part. DNA splicing bypasses the checks and opens us up for disaster.

And how is the result of selective breeding not "self-replicating"?

I never said they weren't. They're just more trustworthy for replication than GMOs.

For that matter, what is the argument behind saying that a selectively bred organism is not a "potential time bomb"? You could easily accidentally create an unusually hardy organism through breeding selection that, if released, could wreack havoc.

It's not impossible, but I would consider it less dangerous because, 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? Also, "unusually hardy" is a far cry from flat-out destructive. We can't fully predict how an organism will behave when we start splicing genes together. Nature has already done the vetting of the unhealthy combinations.

Re:Hmmm

[ianbean]

They're probably ESTs. I think the coffee genome is 500-750Mb (depending on the species), so 200,000 shotgun reads are only going to give you 20% of the genome at best. No way you'd identify 35k genes from that.

You're right - it's hard to see the value of this. WashU does that many sequencing reads in a day - it would probably cost about $1M.

Normally I'm happy to see scientists get recognition for their hard work, but if the data isn't public then, really, why should anyone care?