There are many cases of convergent evolution, but did you know the caffeine made by plants is one of them? In this video, we take this channel’s first steps covering the fascinating science of botany, and talk about how ancient ancestral genes were copied and mutated multiple times independently, leading to the caffeine we know and love today.

REFERENCES
Schönenberger & von Balthazar (2013): https://academic.oup.com/botlinnean/a…

Denoeud et al. (2014):
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.11…

Zhang et al. (2020):
https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/…

Huang et al. (2016):
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073…

Wright et al. (2013):
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.11…

Ceja-Navarro et al. (2015):
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomm…

Ransom (1912):
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles…

Fairtrade:
https://www.fairtrade.org.uk/farmers-…

International Institute for Sustainable Development (2025). Global Market Report: Tea prices and sustainability.
https://www.iisd.org/system/files/202…

Spinosaurus image by Bogdanov, modified by Matt Martyniuk and FunkMonk, from Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…)

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 – Intro
1:13 – Tea, coffee, and more
5:03 – The biochemistry
8:27 – How did this happen?
10:51 – Outro

#science #biology #plants #caffeine #evolution #botany #tea #coffee #convergence #convergent

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