Source: Wikimedia Commons

The city of Armenia in Colombia is located in the heart of one of the most fertile coffee-producing regions in the world. This is where the 25^th International Conference on Coffee Science is currently taking place, and there are two topics that attendants are likely to discuss: The sequencing of the coffee genome, which was recently completed, and how this may help coffee experts to finally produce a decaffeinated cup of coffee that does not taste like it was made with water from the Tarcoles River.

Coffee and science are two favorite subjects of The Costa Rica Star, and thus we are always happy to report on this conference, which just a couple of years ago took place in our country. Back then, the coffee genome sequence had not yet been completed. These days, however, we have access to the sequence of the Coffea canephora genome, which is the species known as robusta. The global coffee market is dominated by Coffea arabica, which is a hybrid strain derived from robusta.

Specifically, coffee scientists can now discern which robusta genes produce caffeine. They already know that robusta’s caffeine evolution differs from other fruit-bearing plant species such as cacao and tea. Caffeine-producing enzymes are now easier to manipulate, which means that geneticists could very well solve a decades-old conundrum for coffee drinkers who could do without the caffeine.

The Decaf Scientific Challenge

In 2012, The Costa Rica Star published The Science of Decaf, an article that gave some background into the scientific quest for a bio-engineered coffee plant that would yield tasty beans that would be superior in taste to the insipidness caused by today’s chemical process of dumping beans into liquid carbon dioxide and sucking the caffeine and taste out of them:

During a 1964 United Nations expedition to the African nations of Eritrea and Ethiopia, several plants of the [arabica] species were collected and brought to Costa Rica. Paulo Mazzafera, a researcher at the University of Campinas in Brazil, tracked down the plant lineages and [sent them] to his [research facility]. Mazzafera has been researching coffee genetics since the 1980s, and at some point he found beans that were naturally low in caffeine -but that lacked the flavor characteristics of the arabica grown in Costa Rica.

 

Mazzafera continued his research and in 2003 he found that out of the 308 plants that were grown in Costa Rica and originated in Ethiopia, a few were defective. Some of these arabica plants failed to produce caffeine, yet retained all other characteristics. By cross breeding these plants with others, Mazzafera hopes to produce a natural decaf strain that can be massively farmed.

The laborious research project described above can now be augmented as recently described by Robbie Gonzalez of iO9, a Gawker Media website:

Knowing which genes are responsible for coffee’s caffeine content would allow breeders to perform gene “knockdowns” that block the plant’s ability to produce the stimulant, says Albert, who sees “no reason why that can’t be a next step.” Knocking down coffee’s caffeine-genes would carry the added benefit of preserving decaf coffee’s flavor; modern decaffeination methods involve chemical processing that can strip coffee of its flavor as well as its caffeine.

And for those readers who are concerned that arabica could become a harmful genetically-modified organism (GMO), Mr. Gonzalez presented such inquiry to University of Buffalo genome scientist Victor Albert, who explained:

breeding a caffeine-free coffee plant would only be a problem if you tried to replant it in its native environment, where it would have to compete with its caffeinated counterparts. In modern agriculture, says Lashermes, the germination of competing plants, and the presence of herbivorous insects, can be controlled in other ways.