Despite being the infamous raw material of the drug cocaine, very little is actually known about the coca plant and its wild relatives in the Andes mountains.
Coca is a tropical shrub in the family Erythroxylaceae, the leaves of which have been used in traditional medicine for centuries across the Andean region, but it is known globally as the source of the drug cocaine. The three main producing countries are Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, but there are also wild relatives and traditional varieties.
Oscar Alejandro Perez-Escobar, a Colombian researcher at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the UK explains that he is working on the classification and evolution of coca because despite being maybe “the plant most controlled by the judicial system”, there have been relatively research done on it.
“I would argue it is the worst understood and most infamous of all cultivated plants grown by man,” he says.
Perez-Escobar is a coauthor on a paper published in July 2024 that studied 342 digitized herbarium coca plant specimens and they found was that leaf shape and size weren’t a reliable way to tell species and varieties apart.
“It is almost impossible to identify cultivated varieties from wild ones if we use traditional methods such as leaf shape; this is the same method that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has used for 20 years,” he says.
“The greatest opportunity has been to help fill in gaps in information about the origin of the coca plant that will ultimately help to disassociate it from its unjustified bad reputation as the source of cocaine —coca is so much more than that!” he says.
Perez-Escobar explains that the first step in developing a conservation program or to find if medicinal drugs, biochemicals, and other commercially valuable material can be developed is to understand which species are to be developed as bio-economies and which are to be preserved.
“To date, doing this in coca is impossible because we do not know how many species there really are,” he says, adding the illegal nature of the coca plant in different countries, greatly limited the amount of plants the team could access for research.
In 2022, other researchers published the results of the genetic sequencing of two of the cultivated varieties of coca.
“Regardless of the doubts about the morphological characters of the leaf and their usefulness in identifying plants, these genetic codes (genomes) are essential to understand biological processes in plants,” Perez-Escobar .
Growing Up in Colombia
Perez-Escobar was born in Bogota, Colombia’s capital city, before moving to the countryside due to economic hardship and starting his undergraduate studies at just 15 years-old.
He would then emigrate to Germany at 21, to pursue a PhD , graduating in 2016 and then doing his postdoc at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where he is currently working as a lead researcher.
“My main field of research has always been the classification and evolution of orchids but more recently I have been working on projects on the evolution of useful plants, such as watermelon, date palm and coca,” he says, adding that a turning point in his career came when he met, during his undergraduate studies, farmer Gamaliel Rios
“He transmitted me his passion for orchids: despite not having finished his high school or taken any formal studies, Gamaliel knew the botanical names of the orchids in the reserve better than the botany professors and his humility, great knowledge and passion marked my life,” he says, “it was thanks to him that I decided to start studying this family of plants.”
Perez-Escobar explains that researchers in the Global South are uniquely positioned to understand the issues that directly affect their regions, allowing them to develop solutions that are more relevant and effective for their communities.
“The biodiversity and ecosystems of the Global South are among the most diverse in the world, and we, local researchers, have a deep understanding of these resources,” he says, “This knowledge is essential not only for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, but also for innovations in areas such as medicine, agriculture and biotechnology.”
Colombia’s Orchids
Another Colombian biologist with a background in orchids is Yesenia Madrigal Bedoya, who is exploring the genes and conditions that make orchids flower — and finding answers could help create new sustainable cut-flower markets and protect the species being over-harvested in the wild.
Madrigal, a PhD candidate student at University of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia, says her current project is focused on the genetic basis for the flowering of Colombian orchids, that is, the genes controlling the transition from vegetative to reproductive phases.
“Orchids are one of the most wonderful and diverse ornamental angiosperms (flowering plants), but their vegetative phases can be excessively long, rendering them unwanted in the floral cut global market,” she says, adding that she also looked at the key environmental cues involved in triggering flowering.
“If we are able to identify candidate genes controlling floral transition, we can set up the basis to understand our biodiversity and manage it for potential sustainable exploitation,” Madrigal says.
