Coffee (Coffea sp.)

Coffee (Coffea sp.) is a perennial plant widely cultivated in many tropical countries. It is a cash crop for millions of small farmers in these areas. As compared with other tree species, coffee has long breeding cycles that make conventional breeding programs time consuming. For that matter, genetic transformation can be an effective technique to introduce a desired trait in an already “elite” variety, or to study a gene function and expression. In this chapter, we describe two Agrobacterium -mediated transformation techniques; the first with A. tumefaciens to introduce an insect resistance gene and the second with A. rhizogenes to study candidate gene expression for nematode resistance in transformed roots.