Newly sequenced genome reveals coffee's prehistoric origin story -- and its future under climate change
"We've used genomic information in plants alive today to go back in time and paint the most accurate picture possible of Arabica's long history, as well as determine how modern cultivated varieties are related to each other," says the study's co-corresponding author, Victor Albert, PhD, Empire Innovation Professor in the UB Department of Biological Sciences, within the College of Arts and Sciences.
To find evidence for the original event, UB researchers and their partners ran their various Arabica genomes through a computational modeling program to look for signatures of the species' foundation. That would align with evidence that coffee cultivation may have started principally in Yemen, around the 15th century. Indian monk Baba Budan is believed to have smuggled the fabled"seven seeds" out of Yemen around 1600, establishing Indian Arabica cultivars and setting the stage for coffee's global reach today.
"They still occasionally bred with each other, but likely stopped around the end of the African humid period and the widening of the strait due to rising sea levels around 8,000 to 9,000 years ago," says Jarkko Salojärvi, assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and another co-corresponding author of work.Cultivated Arabica is estimated to have an effective population size of only 10,000 to 50,000 individuals.
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