Over the years, we’ve mentioned attempts by breeders to call an evolutionary do-over and re-synthesize interspecific hybrid crops like bread wheat, banana, brassicas and peanuts. I don’t think we mentioned an early attempt to do something similar with potato which ended up not quite working to plan. Anyway, point is, they’re going to try it with coffee now, according to Dr Timothy Schilling, executive director of World Coffee Research (WCR):
What we aim to do is to get a bunch of highly diverse C eugenioides and C canephora ((Don’t ask me why the BBC decided to have those Cs, short for Coffea of course, hanging there with no dot after them.)) and cross them, to recreate C arabica but better — more diverse.
I for one would like to taste it.
Will be interesting to see what comes out of this programme