Studies on the Chitinase Activity in Coffee (Coffea Arabica L.) Genetic Resources in India

Diseases and pests cause considerable crop losses and coffee is not an exception to this. In this context, evolving resistant planting stocks is an important breeding objective and finding germplasm carrying resistance is a very important forerunning exercise. Thus, in an exercise of characterizing coffee germplasm, chitinase enzyme activity in leaf and stem bark tissues of various wild and cultivated Arabica coffees is considered important to identify genetic resources carrying resistance to leaf rust disease and white stem borer pest of coffee. A preliminary study to optimize an efficient assay protocol was undertaken with fifteen accessions of Arabica coffee from Ethiopia. The enzyme activity was generally found to be higher in the bark than in the leaf tissues of all accessions studied. However, there are variations of activity within leaf and bark tissues indicating the possibility of selecting plants with higher enzyme activity associated with resistance to leaf rust and/or white stem borer in marker-assisted breeding against these adversaries.