This summer, a team of international scientists announced that they’d completed mapping the genome of the coffee plant. This means scientists can now start tinkering with your favorite pick-me-up to increase its caffeine level or eliminate the caffeine altogether (although why anyone would want such a thing in the first place is unfathomable). And that’s not all. Experts say they could also tweak the coffee plant’s gene so it grows hardier and even adopts new flavor profiles. “It will lead to better production and disease and pest resistance, and also better taste in both robusta and arabica beans,” says industry consultant Andrew Hetzel, who leads training courses for the Coffee Quality Institute. MORE: 4 Ways to Get Amped Up without Coffee But—cue the backward record scratch—does that mean that coffee is on the fast track to becoming genetically modified? Sort of. More like genetically edited, which involves altering a plant’s DNA using its own genes instead of those from another species. To make a coffee with more or less caffeine, it would be a case of telling the caffeine gene to either up-regulate or turn off, respectively, rather than inserting something foreign and crazy like a cucumber gene, which is what happens with GMOs, says Victor A. Albert, a SUNY Buffalo evolutionary biologist who contributed to the genome mapping project. Whether that process is any safer than traditional genetic modification? For now, it’s anyone’s guess. If you’re still not sure whether you’d drink the stuff, at least you have some time to think about it: It will most likely be several years before genetically edited coffee hits store shelves.
