UK scientists turn up the heat on understanding coffee wilt disease which threatens our favourite daily brew

Scientists, including those from Imperial College London, University of Oxford and CABI, have ‘turned up the heat’ on how repeated outbreaks of coffee wilt disease threatened arabica and robusta varieties of our favourite daily coffee brew.The scientists, who present their findings in the journal PLoS Biology, say the fungal pathogen Fusarium xylarioides continues to pose a significant threat to coffee production and incomes across sub-Saharan Africa.Their work supports earlier findings, based on DNA markers and crossing experiments which suggested that F. xylarioides is a species complex containing distinct, host-specific populations.The scientists confirm the presence of genetically differentiated lineages with different host-specificity for arabica and robusta coffee and show that the fungal pathogen F. xylarioides repeatedly took up “horizontally transferred” segments of DNA from a related fungal Fusarium taxa which contributed to successive outbreaks of the disease.Primary ...