Coffee Lovers – Anxiety Days: Scientists Resuscitated Coffee Tree Fungus 70 Years Ago Due To Dangerous Experiment

Coffee dehydration is caused by a fungus that has been causing devastating disease outbreaks in sub-Saharan Africa since the 1930s and is now affecting the most popular types of coffee: arabica and robusta.

Sustainable solutions

A team of researchers from ICL, the University of Oxford and the agricultural non-profit organization CABI also notes that studying historical samples from CABI’s crop collection could provide a lot of information on the evolution of crop diseases and find new and sustainable ways to combat them. The study was published on June 5 by BMC Genomics.

The first author of the article, Lily Peck, said: “For many growers, the use of increasing amounts of chemicals and fungicides to control emerging diseases of crops is not a sustainable or affordable way.

Instead, by exploring the development of new types of diseases, we could provide growers with the knowledge they need to reduce the occurrence of new diseases.

Strains aimed at coffee

The team revived cryogenically preserved samples of the fungus that causes coffee trees to dry out. There have been two serious outbreaks of the disease, from the 1930s to the 1960s and 1990s, and the damage continues today.

In 2011, for example, a drought in Tanzania damaged 55,000 Robusta coffee trees and destroyed 160 tons of coffee, equivalent to more than 22 million cups of coffee.

Since the outbreak began in the 1930s, CWD has infected a wide variety of coffees and was stopped in the 1960s by adopting practices such as burning infected trees, seeking natural resistance, and crossbreeding programs to obtain more resistant varieties.

However, the disease reappeared in the 1970s and spread at the turn of the century. Two distinct disease populations have been identified that infect only specific types of coffee: one is Arabica coffee in Ethiopia and the other is Robusta coffee in East and Central Africa. The team wanted to know how these two strains came about.

Genomein

In a secure CABI laboratory, two strains from the first outbreak, collected in 1950 and placed in the CABI collection, and two from two strains of a particular coffee fungus, the most recent of which was taken in 2003, were resuscitated. fungal genomes and DNA looked for changes that could help them infect those particular types of coffee.

Newer, species-specific fungi have been shown to have larger genomes than previous strains, and genes have been identified that could help fungi overcome and survive plant defenses, causing disease.

Furthermore, these genes have been shown to be very similar to those found in other closely related fungi that infect more than 120 different plants, including bananas in sub-Saharan Africa, which caused the Panama disease, which now terrifies its most popular variety, Cavendish bananas.

Although these fungi that infect banana are known for their ability to exchange genes with each other, thus transmitting the ability to infect new varieties, gene transfer to other species of fungi has not been previously recorded.

Be that as it may, the team points out that these species sometimes live together on the coffee tree and banana root, so it is possible that coffee fungi inherited these advantageous genes from neighbors normally found on bananas.

Coffee and bananas often grow together because coffee trees like the shade of taller bananas. The researchers say that the conclusion of their study is that it is not worth growing crops close to related diseases such as bananas and coffee, and it could reduce the development of new strains of the fungus that attacks coffee.

The evolution of shoots

Researchers are now infecting coffee trees in the laboratory with revived strains to discover how specific fungi are infecting the plant. This could suggest other ways to prevent the disease.

This knowledge could be applied to other crops, where nearby plant pathogens can make such leaps and cause new diseases. Having demonstrated the value of analyzing plant samples to detect historical plant diseases, the research team plans to replicate the study with other diseases stored in the CABI collection, which contains 30,000 samples collected from the world over 100 years.

Mister. researcher prof. Timothy Barraclough, from the Oxford Department of Zoology and ICL’s Department of Life Sciences, said: “This historic action reveals what is happening to plant pathogens before and after a new outbreak. In this way, we can study evolutionary mechanisms and improve the prediction of similar outbreaks.

We plan to replicate this study with many plant pathogens and compile a “rule book” for the development of pathogenicity to help prevent outbreaks where possible. “

Nuoroda: “Historical Genomics Reveals Evolutionary Mechanisms Behind Multiple Outbreaks of the Host-Specific Coffee Wilt Pathogen Fusarium xylarioides” by Lily D. Peck, Reuben W. Nowell, Julie Flood, Matthew R. Ryan, and Timothy G. Barraclough , June 4, 2021, BMC Genomics.
Sources:

https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-021-07700-4

70-Year-Old Coffee-Killing Fungus Brought Back to Life by Scientists – Here’s Why

Imperial College London

scitechdaily.com