SCIENTISTS have discovered Australia has its own coffee bean growing on Cape York.

Plans are afoot to mount a botanical expedition into the rugged wilderness, north of Laura, next month to collect living specimens of the newly identified plant.

Researchers are abuzz with the potential of the native coffee but it is so new to science it is unknown if the latest find contains caffeine or if it will produce a flavoursome brew of the world's most loved drink.

Ethnobotanists are in contact with Cape York Aboriginal medicine men like Tommy George, of Laura, to see if the plant was known to Kuku Thaipan and other tribes that inhabit the region, famous for its 38,000-year-old Quinkan rock art.

They hope to find evidence Aborigines may have brewed, crushed or eaten the native coffee beans as a bush tonic for heightened alertness or energy, as an appetite suppressant or for its medicinal qualities.

"We know almost nothing about it," Professor Darren Crayn, director of the Cairns-based Australian Tropical Herbarium at James Cook University, said yesterday.

"It is the very first and only native species of coffee found in the wild in Australia.

"As far as we know it is not growing anywhere in cultivation, the specimens we have are preserved and archived.

"We don't know its chemical structure or even if it contains caffeine let alone what sort of brew it might make."

He said the most commercial arabica coffee is understood to have originated from Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.

But it was unlikely the native coffee, known by its new scientific name of Coffea brassii, was introduced to New Guinea and north Australia by the ancient human transmigrations out of Africa over the Gondwanaland period, he said.

Taxonomy scientists under Dr Aaron Davis in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in the United Kingdom identified the plant, previously known under the genus Psilanthus, as belonging to the coffea genus.

DNA sequencing in molecular studies found the plants are much more closely related to coffea genus.

It is understood Dr Davis used matter collected in post-1960 scientific expeditions into Cape York.

Future research may include genetic studies to improve commercial strains of coffee in Australia as well as tests on the quality and flavour of the coffee bean as a homegrown beverage.

Prof Crayn said an expedition would head up to Cape York to find the native coffee plant within the next month.

There are 150 different species of coffee in the ancient plant group that has become one of the most traded agricultural commodities in the world.

The latest discovery is symbolic of the vast unknown biodiversity of the state's north, with Australian botanists discovering up to 200 new species of plants every year.