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What Makes A Coffee Good? Its sugar metabolism	By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor 7th of February 2007, 12:23 GMT Adjust text size:


In an increasingly competitive world, only quality coffee sells. To improve coffee quality, researchers must solve many details of the tree's biological processes like flowering and fruit ripening that in the end determine beans composition (carbohydrates, fats, caffeine, etc). Sucrose, a carbohydrate known as sugar, seems to be essential in coffee's organoleptic quality, because the compounds resulted after its breakdown during roasting are extremely important in determining the coffee's flavor. CIRAD and the Agricultural Institute of Paran� in Brazil (IAPAR) have been investigating since 2001 how key enzymes in the sucrose metabolism act during the fruit's ripening. The research revealed that, unlike in most plants, where the inverstase enzyme is the most important in sucrose's metabolism, in coffee beans the enzyme named synthetase is the main enzyme involved in sucrose accumulation. Coffee's synthetase is present in two isoforms (variants of the same molecule), encoded by two distinct genes: SUS1 and SUS2. SUS2 appeared very active during the end of the ripening and just before picking, but the effect of SUS1 was sucrose breakdown for energy production, not sucrose accumulation (as in the case of SUS2) and this enzyme was highly active during plant's growth and development. The researchers also checked the nucleotidic variation of these genes between various coffee strains or inside the same strain, in order to find early markers of sucrose content, a quality issue. These markers have been already used to investigate the link between shading, known to improve coffee quality, and sucrose enzymes. The research team revealed that sucrose SUS 2 synthetase and sucrose phosphate synthetase, also an enzyme in the sucrose metabolism, were more active in the beans of coffee trees grown in the shade than in those grown in full sunlight. But in the end, beans collected from trees grown in the shade and in full sunlight presented similar sucrose percentage. Thus, the quality of shaded coffee may not stay in its sugar content, but in the reorientation of the sugar metabolism towards the production of other chemicals, perhaps fats.

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