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

obvious mod

[Froze]

Make it produce 20 times the caffiene of a normal bean. Then it can compete with brazils other export the coca plant.

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:obvious mod

[dacarr]

If you drink five cups of it, yeah, it is.

I think the LD50 of caffeine is right around 8-10 grams, and since one cup of joe on average contains 100 mg caffeine, the LD50 of coffee is roughly 80 cups of coffee. But, your body will burn off caffeine faster than you can drink all that coffee normally, so the only way to get that much caffeine from coffee directly is to pump it straight into your stomach - and even then, you're more likely to get internal injuries and diarrhea than a fatal case of coffee shakes from that.

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.

Just what Sun needs

[HMA2000]

More competition for Java

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.

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.

Not Just Brazil

[martyb]

Brazil is not the only place performing these analyses... check out what they are doing in Hawaii

Better watch the IP issues

[dpilot]

They MUST be infringing on SCO IP, somewhere, somewow!

Columbia in pursuit of perfection too.

[saden1]

Not to be outdone, the Columbian Ministry of Agriculture announced a new project to map the genetic make up of the Coca Plant. The ministry wasn't specific but has indicated that it plans to create super “something.”

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

[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?

Sinners! Heathens! Heretics!

[Anonymous Coward]

However, it hopes to use the data to raise production of gourmet, organic and new caffeine-free beans within two years.

Caffeine-free coffee! How dare they!?

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

Sequencing

[IBX]

a soccer player genome will be next

Service Pot 2?

[Rie Beam]

My only concern - will we have to patch our coffee pots?

Re:Starbucks rejoice!

[jafuser]

By enabling intergenetic breeding, the genes from a cocoa plant can be placed direclty into coffee beans, alongside genes from a cow.

Even better, how about doing research for gene therapy so that my body makes it's own caffiene =)

Imagine Juan Valdez

[Man in Spandex]

He must be one pissed mofo to have scientists work on beans.
and I quote from beavis & butthead

"It is in these hills that Juan Valdez and his trusty goat gather coffee beans every morning."

Re:sadly a super coffee

[Wireless Joe]

I just tried this new super coffee, and it's like a koala crapped a rainbow in my brain! They should call it Stimutacs.

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. :-)

Cross-breeding

[ALeavitt]

I'm betting that they add a ton of caffeine, then splice it with genes from tobacco, coca, and poppies, and make the most addictive substance known to man.

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: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.

Re:Starbucks rejoice!

[phillymacmike]

I'm sorry, but the idea of a cow's teat, full of frappacino, growing out of my chest, doesn't seem like that good an idea....