New progress has been made in the research on the anti-rust mechanism of coffee

Coffee rust caused by Hemileia vastatrix is a devastating disease that has become an important crop protection problem
restricting coffee production.
Among the small grain coffee (Coffea arabica), medium grain coffee (Coffea canephora) and large seed coffee that are mainly used for commercial cultivation, the rust resistance of large grain coffee is strong, and the analysis of its anti-rust mechanism is of great significance
for the selection and breeding of new rust-resistant coffee varieties.
The research team assembled the transcriptome of large-grain coffee by next-generation sequencing technology, obtained a total of 55446 transcripts, selected single-copy genes to construct a maximal likelihood evolutionary tree of coffee species, and found that large-grain coffee was closely related to medium-grain coffee
.
At the same time, the phenylalanine lyase gene (PAL) of coffee species was identified, and it was found that its expression level was high
in large-grain coffee and medium-grain coffee.
Expression analysis showed that after rust infection, the expression level of PAL gene in HDT of small-grain coffee rust-resistant cultivars was significantly higher than that of rust-sensing varieties Caturra, indicating that it was closely related to coffee rust resistance, which provided an important reference
for the selection and breeding of coffee rust-resistant varieties 。 The study was published in Industrial Crops and Products under the title "De novo transcriptome assembly of Coffea liberica reveals phylogeny and expression atlas of phenylalanine ammonia-lyase genes in Coffea species"
。 Assistant researcher Huang Xing of the Institute of Environmental Plantation of the Chinese Academy of Thermal Sciences is the first author of the paper, and Associate Professor Wu Weihuai and Professor Yi Kexian are the corresponding authors
of the paper.
The research was supported by the Hainan Provincial Science and Technology Association Youth Science and Technology Talents Innovation Program, the Basic Scientific Research Funds of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences, and the support of the Key Laboratory of Integrated Management of Tropical Crop Pests of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, the Hainan Provincial Key Laboratory of Tropical Agricultural Pest Monitoring and Control, and the Hainan Academician Team Innovation Center
.

Large-grain coffee transcript annotation (A) and single-copy gene-constructed coffee genus maximum likelihood tree (B)