Enfoque molecular e análise computacional relacionados à qualidade e amadurecimento dos frutos de café

Abstract

Coffee is one of the most commercialized beans in the world, grown under different conditions that differ from one region to another, such as climate, altitude, soil and light, conditions that cause changes in the desirable characteristics of the bean. Another determining factor is the species, of which Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora are the ones of commercial interest. All of this causes changes from sequential flowering, with consequent uneven fruit development and ripening, to the final content of storage compounds in the grains. Therefore, three chapters have been developed in this work to address the problems mentioned above. The first provides a general review of the subject, including its importance, phenology, ripening, harvesting and the technological tools used to monitor it. In the second chapter, a study was carried out with the aim of evaluating the effect of applying ethylene to accelerate coffee fruit ripening and homogenize the harvest, as well as to monitor and compare this effect using visual vs. images counting. The analysis of quantification and yield showed that the application of ETEFOM had no effect on ripening, which could be due to other factors. Despite this, it was possible to determine that, by means of images quantification and according to the grouped classification of the fruit, better precision was obtained with a margin of error of 4% in relation to the harvest, while in visual quantification it was 7%. The third chapter presents a review of the literature on the molecular quality of coffee, focusing on the main storage compounds, as well as the processes related to fruit ripening. This review shows that there is little information available on the gene expression that regulates these processes. Furthermore, correlations of these genes are needed in future studies to determine key points that help understand the networks of interactions that trigger the synthesis of these compounds.