A wake-up call with coffee
2014
Zamir, Dani
The captain of the starship Voyager from one of the latter-day Star Trek television series expressed the sentiments of many by stating: “Coffee, the finest organic suspension ever devised.” On page 1181, Denoeud et al. present a draft genome of the diploid Coffea canephora (1), one of the two founder species of the tetraploid crop Coffea arabica . Coffee, the plant bearing the irresistible bean that delivers the most widely consumed psychoactive drug in the world—caffeine—joins a long list of crop species that have been sequenced using ever-improving genomic hardware and assembly software (2). High-quality genome assemblies facilitate the resequencing of many cultivated varieties, landraces (local ecotypes), and sometimes wild, crop-related species. The challenge now is to translate these decoded genomes into new and improved tools for plant breeding; there is a need for a better balance of research priorities, with greater emphasis on crop phenotypes.
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