Abstract: Terpenoids are catalyzed by terpenoid synthase and have important physiological, ecological and medicinal value. By integrating data for the Coffee canephora genome and transcriptome, terpenoid synthase genes from C. canephora were identified. Then, the molecular evolution, structure, duplication and expression pattern of the genes were analyzed. Finally, functional differentiation among the terpenoid synthase subfamilies was investigated. C. canephora contains 43 full-length terpenoid synthase genes, which can be divided into 5 subfamilies (a, b, c, e/f, g), with largely different gene structure. Amplification of the genes is mainly caused by tandem duplication. Also the expression pattern of C. canephora terpenoid synthases differs in different tissues. Functional differentiation between each terpenoid synthase subfamily may have several reasons; cis-regulatory elements in the gene promoter region may be strongly related to functional differentiation and the differentiation is mainly caused by the subfamily-specific amino acid.

Key words: bioinformatics, Coffee canephora, functional differentiation, molecular evolution, terpenoid synthase