{"id":78269,"date":"2026-07-06T14:26:32","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T21:26:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/?p=78269"},"modified":"2026-07-06T14:27:54","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T21:27:54","slug":"bonomo-coffee-berry-borer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/bonomo-coffee-berry-borer\/","title":{"rendered":"Rescuing the world\u2019s coffee from a tiny pest"},"content":{"rendered":"

Think your caffeine tolerance is high? Think again. While the average person drinks about three cups of coffee a day,\u00a0that\u2019s\u00a0nothing compared to what the coffee berry borer can handle.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These 1- to 2-millimeter-long beetles, which drill into growing coffee beans and eat them from the inside out,\u00a0are able to\u00a0ingest about 100 times more caffeine than a human relative to their body weight.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Lynn<\/a>\u201cFor an average human, it\u2019s considered too much to have more than\u00a0400 milligrams\u00a0of caffeine a day\u2014that\u2019s about four cups of coffee or two of those Celsius energy drinks,\u201d said NAU Ph.D. student\u00a0<\/span>Lynn Bonomo<\/span><\/b>. \u201cIf we had the same tolerance as a coffee berry borer, we could have 400 cups of coffee a day.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This invasive animal\u2019s freakishly high caffeine tolerance is\u00a0bad news\u00a0for coffee lovers everywhere. Originally found only in central and western Africa, the coffee berry borer has now spread to every coffee-growing area of the world, causing losses of an estimated 30% of crops and more than $500 million. The beetles are especially destructive to arabica coffee plants, which represent about 60-70% of the coffee we drink.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What can be done to recover all that lost coffee? Bonomo is on a mission to find out.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Within associate professor\u00a0<\/span>Javier Ceja-Navarro<\/span><\/b>\u2019s lab\u00a0in\u00a0the Center\u00a0for\u00a0Ecosystem Science and Society at NAU, Bonomo is studying the coffee berry borer\u2019s gut microbiome in hopes of finding ways to degrade its caffeine tolerance.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe know it\u2019s able to withstand these toxic levels of caffeine because its gut microbiome can break it down really effectively,\u201d Bonomo said. \u201cSo\u00a0we\u2019re looking at using biological controls to target the gut microbiome in hopes that it changes their ability to break down caffeine.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Working from the inside out<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

Farmers have already learned that the coffee berry borer\u00a0isn\u2019t\u00a0deterred by other pest management strategies. Some have tried regularly inspecting plants for bore holes and then burning any affected plants to save the rest of their crops, but\u00a0they\u2019ve\u00a0found they\u00a0can\u2019t\u00a0work fast enough to stop the beetles\u2019 spread. Others have released parasitoid wasps, a natural predator to the beetle, into their fields\u2014but the wasps can only eradicate the beetles when\u00a0they\u2019re\u00a0crawling outside the coffee berry, not once\u00a0they\u2019ve\u00a0bored their way inside the fruit. Still others have tried using insect traps, but those tend to also trap insects that are beneficial for coffee plants. The same goes for pesticide use\u2014those sprays are toxic not only to the borers but also to pollinators and other insects that help coffee plants grow and thrive.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Coffee<\/a>
Just 1 to 2 millimeters long, coffee berry borers are able to drill into growing coffee and eat them from the inside out.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cSome farms use what\u2019s called an integrated pest management system, where they combine factors together, accounting for things like weather, time of year and population levels of the beetles,\u201d Bonomo said.\u00a0\u201cThat works better, but\u00a0unless you have a ton of workers and a lot of\u00a0money and scientific knowledge to implement that,\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0hard to do. Most farmers around the world do not have the means,\u00a0knowledge\u00a0and money for that.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s\u00a0why Bonomo is looking for a solution that works from the inside out, rather than the\u00a0outside in.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the Navarro lab, Bonomo flexes her beetle barista skills, feeding the coffee berry borers a few different custom diets to understand the insects’ caffeine tolerance. As the beetles feed on those diets and reproduce, Bonomo uses genomic sequencing to find out how the microbiota of each generation of beetles respond to caffeine.\u00a0Ultimately, Bonomo\u00a0will use this pattern to understand how future biological controls targeting the caffeine-degrading bacteria can influence the beetles and their microbiome. Her goal is to find biological controls that prevent the beetles from tolerating their usual\u00a0high levels\u00a0of caffeine.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"petri<\/a>
In the lab, Bonomo is feeding the coffee berry borers a few different custom diets to understand the insects’ caffeine tolerance.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThat means they\u2019re no longer able to consume the levels of caffeine needed to get them inside the bean, which means they\u2019d stay on the outside of the plant and be exposed to other pesticide controls that work,\u201d Bonomo said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Next steps<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

If Bonomo succeeds, the next step is to develop a strategy that can change the coffee borer beetle\u2019s gut bacteria outside of a lab setting.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe it could be\u00a0a fertilizer\u00a0powder or a pesticide-like spray,\u201d Bonomo said, \u201csomething\u00a0that\u2019s\u00a0super easy for the coffee farmers to apply because it\u00a0wouldn\u2019t\u00a0require any new or different equipment.\u00a0That\u2019s\u00a0my hope, but\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0a\u00a0ways\u00a0away;\u00a0we\u2019re\u00a0near the beginning of the process.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Bonomo hopes her research makes an impact beyond the world of coffee.\u00a0The findings may apply to other invasive pests, like\u00a0the potato\u00a0beetle and mountain pine beetle. They might even prove beneficial to human health, she said.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf someone has bacteria that shouldn\u2019t be in their gut at such high levels or that is causing an issue in their gut microbiome, there could be a way to target that more effectively than our current antibiotics, which also kill good bacteria,\u201d Bonomo said.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Northern<\/span><\/p>\n


\nJill Kimball | NAU Communications
\n(928) 523-2282 | jill.kimball@nau.edu<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Think your caffeine tolerance is high? Think again. While the average person drinks about three cups of coffee a day,\u00a0that\u2019s\u00a0nothing compared to what the coffee berry borer can handle.\u00a0 These 1- to 2-millimeter-long beetles, which drill into growing coffee beans and eat them from the inside out,\u00a0are able to\u00a0ingest about 100 times more caffeine than…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2880,"featured_media":78270,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-academics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2880"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78269"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78277,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78269\/revisions\/78277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}