70-Year-Old Coffee-Killing Fungus Brought Back to Life to Fight the Disease
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:
Coffee Wilt Disease is caused by a fungus that has led to devastating outbreaks since the 1920s in sub-Saharan Africa, and currently affects two of Africa's most popular coffee varieties: Arabica and Robusta.
The new research shows that the fungus likely boosted its ability to infect coffee plants by acquiring genes from a closely related fungus, which causes wilt disease on a wide range of crops, including Panama disease in bananas.
[...] The team re-animated cryogenically frozen samples of the fungus that causes Coffee Wilt Disease. There have been two serious outbreaks of the disease, in the 1920s-1950s and between the 1990s-2000s, and it still causes damage. For example, in 2011, 55,000 Robusta coffee trees were killed by wilt in Tanzania, destroying 160T of coffee in the process - equivalent to over 22 million cups of coffee.
[...] In a secure lab at CABI, they re-awakened two strains from the original outbreak, collected in the 1950s and deposited into CABI's collection, and two strains each from the two coffee-specific fungal strains, with the most recent from 2003. They then sequenced the genomes of the fungi and examined their DNA for evidence of changes that could have helped them infect these specific coffee varieties.
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