STiR coffee and tea magazine

STiR coffee and tea 25 SALIM ARIA NOUSH (Ltd) Expertly Brings You The Best Of Iranian Teas and Herbals. ISO 9001:2008 Certificate. I ISO 10002:2004 Certificate. I HACCP Certificate. I HALAL Certificate. I info@ salimaria.com Tel : +98 21 5589 4000 I Fax : +98 21 555 900 15 visit salimaria.com water, fertilizer, or pesticides while still maintaining high-quality flavor profiles." Inside the gene The lead researcher in the sequencing is Professor Lizhi Gao, a botanist at the Plant Germplasm and Genomics Cen- ter, Germplasm Bank of Wild Species in Southwestern China, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming. "Our lab has successfully sequenced and assembled more than 20 plant ge- nomes," Prof. Gao told the BBC, "But this genome, the tea tree genome, was tough." The genome contained 3 billion base pairs. The Camellia genus is largely orna- mental with more than 100 species. But only Camellia sinensis is grown commer- cially for making tea, according to pro- fessor Gao. This is because researchers found that the leaves of the tea plant contain high levels of chemicals that give tea its distinctive flavor. They include fla- vonoids and caffeine. Gao found the biochemical pathways involved in the synthesis of the com- pounds important in the taste of tea are also present in some of the ancestors of tea and have been conserved for about 6.3 mil- lion years. There are even hints some modification may be related to human cultivation. Coffea arabica is complex too, according to researchers at UC Davis. In a release, the university described "C. arabica is a hybrid cross derived from two other plant species: C. canephora (robusta coffee), and the closely related C. eugenioides. As a result of that hybrid crossing, C. arabica's complex genome has four sets of chromosomes — unlike many other plants and humans, which have only two chromosome sets." UC Davis researchers estimated that UCG-17 Geisha has a genome made up of 1.19 billion base pairs — about one-third that of the human genome. Work continues The next step will be finding DNA markers that are closely associated with desirable traits, explains professor Apostolides. "In tea, there are some known physical markers that are closely, but not perfectly, associated with some desirable traits, e.g. leaf pubes- cence with tea aroma, yellow leaf color with good quality, small leaf size for drought Phylogenetic analysis of the retrotransportation sequence in the tea genome

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