Abstract
Climate change is posing a major challenge to coffee production worldwide leading to a need for the development of coffee cultivars with increased drought tolerance. In several plant species, the use of DREB genes in crop improvement has achieved promising results to desiccation tolerance engineering. Recent studies reported CcDREB1D specific patterns of expression in Coffea canephora and functional evidence of this gene involvement in drought stress responses. However, knowledge on natural diversity of this gene is largely unknown. In this context, this study aimed at evaluating the sequence variability of the DREB1D gene in several Coffea genotypes. Nucleotide variation in promoters and coding regions of this gene were evaluated in a population consisting of 38 genotypes of C. canephora, C. arabica and C. eugenioides, most of them characterized by different phenotypes (tolerance vs. susceptibility) in relation to drought. The genetic diversity of the loci revealed different haplotypes for the promoter and coding regions. In particular, our findings suggest association between drought tolerance and the genetic variations on DREB1D promoter regions, but not with those from its corresponding coding regions. Gene expression studies revealed up-regulated expression of DREB1D gene upon drought mainly in leaves of drought-tolerant clones of C. canephora, and in response to drought, high, and low temperatures in leaves of C. arabica, suggesting a key role of this gene in coffee responses to abiotic stress.