Coffee is one of the most widely consumed agricultural products worldwide. The most well-known coffee species in the market are Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora. Currently, 42 varieties are recognized within C. arabica, but strangely, with very low levels of intraspecific genetic diversity despite its worldwide geographical distribution. In addition, little is known about its phylogeographical history. Although there exist descriptive hypotheses of worldwide colonization patterns and origin for C. arabica (by Ferreira et al. in 2019), none of them are molecularly supported. In this study, data mining and bioinformatic approaches, allowing to collect DNA sequences of the Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) region available up to date. All sequences were analyzed under the Relaxed-Random-Walk (RRW) methodology, aiming to estimate ancestral areas and spatiotemporal dispersion patterns, with South American insights. ITS was also used with Single Locus Species Discovery (SLSD) methodology, which allows the delimitation of putative lineages/species (cryptic diversity). RRW supported that the origin and the genetic diversity center of C. arabica species took place between Ethiopia and South Sudan. The study also found evidence of five colonization events and the dispersion of the species within Latin America. SLSD estimated two to 12 cryptic lineages/species within C. arabica depending on the algorithm used; with Latin America being home to two to six of these lineages. The results suggest that the evolutionary history and global dispersion of C. arabica is more complex than historians have registered, showing intermediary regions and ancestors unpublished nowadays, as well as a cryptic diversity being underestimated.
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