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| Tuesday, 29 June 2004 |
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News that brews: Decaffeinated coffee - naturally PARIS, (AFP) Delighted Brazilian scientists say they have found a rare variety of coffee plant that should provide the world's first cup of naturally decaffeinated but full-tasting coffee. The home of the plant is in Ethiopia, but its remarkable qualities were spotted by agricultural researchers in Campinas, in Sao Paulo state, who were screening 3,000 coffee bushes that are being grown under a programme launched in 1987 aimed at reducing caffeine content in coffee beans. The plants are varieties of Coffea arabica, a species which accounts for 70 percent of all coffee consumed in the world. Three specimens of the precious variety, called AC1, AC2 and AC3, were found to be "almost completely free" of caffeine, the Brazilians say. The study is reported in the British science weekly, Nature. Lead researcher is Paulo Mazzafera of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas.. Decaffeination is achieved by an industrial process in which the beans are exposed to a solvent to leach out the caffeine. But that also destroys many of the compounds that make up the complex bouquet of flavours in a good cup of coffee. The process is also energy intensive, and this adds to the price. Last year, Japanese biotechnologists announced they had developed a genetically-modified bush that reduced the activity of caffeine genes in a common strain of coffee plant, Coffea canephora, by between 50 and 70 percent. The Brazilian researchers say the next task is to transfer the genes from AC1, AC2 and AC3 into mainstream varieties of C. arabica. The goal is a product which combines the best qualities - an easy-to-grow coffee that has full flavour but is naturally caffeine-free. But this task can be done through conventional crossbreeding using tissue culture, and not through recombinant DNA, they believe. "Given that C. arabica has a narrow genetic diversity and that even ‰varieties– from Ethiopia and Arabia, as well as old varieties, all produce high-quality coffee, it is likely that AC plants will produce a good beverage," they say. Previous attempts to graft caffeine-free traits from a wild coffee plant found in Madagascar to C. arabica were disastrous. This was because C. arabica has a strong genetic barrier that resists genes imported from other strains. The coffee tasted horrible. Coffee belongs to the botanical family Rubiaceae, which has some 500 genera and over 6,000 species. |
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