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Jolt!: Convergent evolution of caffeine

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File:A small cup of coffee.JPG From Nature:

Caffeine’s buzz is so nice it evolved twice. The coffee genome has now been published, and it reveals that the coffee plant makes caffeine using a different set of genes from those found in tea, cacao and other perk-you-up plants.

Caffeine evolved long before sleep-deprived humans became addicted to it, probably to defend the coffee plant against predators and for other benefits. For example, coffee leaves contain the highest levels of caffeine of any part of the plant, and when they fall on the soil they stop other plants from growing nearby.

“Caffeine also habituates pollinators and makes them want to come back for more, which is what it does to us, too,” says Victor Albert, a genome scientist at the University of Buffalo in New York, who co-led the sequencing effort. The results were published on 4 September in Science.

Now that is a new strategy for getting pollen carried around. Addict the insects.

Note: The article is open access.

Here’s the abstract:

Coffee is a valuable beverage crop due to its characteristic flavor, aroma, and the stimulating effects of caffeine. We generated a high-quality draft genome of the species Coffea canephora, which displays a conserved chromosomal gene order among asterid angiosperms. Although it shows no sign of the whole-genome triplication identified in Solanaceae species such as tomato, the genome includes several species-specific gene family expansions, among them N-methyltransferases (NMTs) involved in caffeine production, defense-related genes, and alkaloid and flavonoid enzymes involved in secondary compound synthesis. Comparative analyses of caffeine NMTs demonstrate that these genes expanded through sequential tandem duplications independently of genes from cacao and tea, suggesting that caffeine in eudicots is of polyphyletic origin.

Editor’s summary: Caffeine has evolved multiple times among plant species, but no one knows whether these events involved similar genes. Denoeud et al. sequenced the Coffea canephora (coffee) genome and identified a conserved gene order (see the Perspective by Zamir). Although this species underwent fewer genome duplications than related species, the relevant caffeine genes experienced tandem duplications that expanded their numbers within this species. Scientists have seen similar but independent expansions in distantly related species of tea and cacao, suggesting that caffeine might have played an adaptive role in coffee evolution.

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Comments
Excuse me, while I go and put the kettle on, will you. Actually, I had been prompted to do that without realising why..!Axel
September 6, 2014
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Suuuuure it did. My goodness but these guys can spin a good story, seems there is no end to their imagination. Good thing I suppose since if they relied on actual facts and evidence they'd be out of jobs.humbled
September 6, 2014
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