Abstract

Coffee plant is one of the most important industrial crops, and the two popular cultivars, Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora, contribute to the production of almost all coffee beans around the world. Although the demand for coffee beans is continually increasing, the steady production of coffee beans is hampered by many factors, such as environmental stresses, insect pests, and diseases. Traditional breeding could be used to develop new coffee cultivars with a higher productivity under these harsh conditions, and a biotechnological approach can also be used to improve coffee plants in a relatively short period of time. To develop new coffee cultivars via a biotechnological approach, it is necessary to discover potential candidate genes and determine their functions in coffee plants. However, it is technically difficult to introduce foreign genes into coffee genome and takes long time to analyze gene function in coffee plants. To overcome these technical difficulties, the potential coffee genes could be cloned and introduced into Arabidopsis for the rapid analysis of its biological functions under harsh environmental conditions.