Brazil maps coffee DNA.

BRAZIL -- Scientists in Brazil have cracked the genetic code of the country's best-known product, coffee, and are hoping to use the information to create a super coffee, richer in taste, more aromatic and resistant to disease and frost, reports the Straits Times.

A two-year government-project that cost $6 million studied 200,000 sequences of coffee DNA and identified 35,000 genes which in combination give the drink its flavor and aroma, according to a statement made on the Brazilian Agriculture Minister Roberto Rodrigues' ministry's Web site.

Discovering coffee's genome sequence was the project's first phase. Researchers will now work to determine the genes' functions, which will allow them to apply for patents, said coordinator Carlos Colombo.

The goal is to create "a coffee with better, flavor, taste and resistance to disease and weather," said Colombo, a professor at the Agronomy Institute of Campinas.

The project will cost $2 million (S$3.5 million) and the data will at first only be accessible the Brazilian government and applied to the country's coffee production. But five or six years from now, researchers say the information will be open to all Brazilian companies. Foreign competitors may be able to use the information then, for a price.

Brazil's coffee industry employs 8.5 million people. The country controls 28% of the world's market and exported $1.5 billion worth in its last harvest.

Brazil hopes to use the data to raise, production of gourmet, organic and new caffeine-free beans within two years. They will use the government-run database to develop, through natural means, a "super coffee" that tastes and smells good, while doubling the country's coffee crop and cutting production costs by 20%. This would be achieved naturally through cross-pollination of coffee plants and not through genetic modifications in a laboratory, he added.