Towards a better understanding of the Coffea arabica genome structure

An international consortium was initiated in 2012 with the goal to perform the sequencing of the Coffea arabica genome. This consortium includes 34 researchers, engineers and technicians coming from 13 institutions in six different countries. In December 2013 the first draft genome of a Coffea species was published in Science (Denoeud et al. 2014), it is the genome of the C. canephora species, a diploid and the second mainly cultivated species after C. arabica. This later species is the only tetraploid of the genus resulting from a recent spontaneous hybridization (± 0,5 Mya) between C. eugenioides, a wild species from East Africa, and C. canephora, whose genome was sequenced (Lashermes et al. 1999).