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Genes behind lager yeast's cold- and sugar-loving success revealed
Lager beer is cold, crisp, dry — and worth about half a trillion dollars worldwide. Behind the world's most popular alcoholic beverage is a yeast adapted to the cold, and hungry for the sugars it will transform into bubbles and booze. That yeast is a hybrid, an amalgamation of the domesticated baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and a recently discovered wild species, Saccharomyces eubayanus. Hundreds of years ago, the two species combined their strengths into a cold-fermenting strain that readily produces the crisp, light taste that came to dominate the beer market in the centuries that followed.
In a pair of new papers, University of Wisconsin–Madison Professor of Genetics Chris Todd Hittinger, his graduate student EmilyClare Baker and others show how modern lager yeast adopted the cold-loving and sugar-hungry traits essential to their success.
In one paper, to be published Feb. 1 in Science Advances, the team demonstrates that when the cold-loving S. eubayanus donated its mitochondria — the power-generating portion of the cell — to the new hybrid, it conferred cold tolerance on the strain. Today, all industrial lager strains retain the S. eubayanus mitochondria and ferment at cold temps.
In a second paper, Baker and Hittinger investigated the ability of S. eubayanus to ferment all the sugars in wort, the barley malt extract that ferments into beer. Most strains of S. eubayanus cannot ferment maltotriose, the second-most common sugar in wort. But the researchers were able to evolve a brand-new protein capable of transporting maltotriose into the cell, revealing a potential path to more aggressive fermentation of all available sugars, a key trait in producing a dry, crisp beer. The paper was published on the pre-print server bioRxiv ahead of publication in the journal PLOS Genetics.
Mitochondrial DNA and temperature tolerance in lager yeasts (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aav1869) (DX)
(Score: -1, Troll) by VLM on Friday February 01 2019, @02:11PM (7 children)
Isn't it kinda racist to assume genetics could have any impact on performance or behavior?
I mean, every scientist knows that those yeast behaviors are a mere social construct of the observer and don't really exist outside the minds of racists.
What if one of the cold loving yeasts identified as a baker yeast, who are we to judge or deadname them?
Its just a very problematic article.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday February 01 2019, @07:35PM (2 children)
You should put your straw men away and talk with some of us actual humans.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday February 01 2019, @07:45PM (1 child)
He should start small and talk to the yeast.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @08:33PM
Those yeast are doing something useful. Why punish them like that?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday February 01 2019, @09:06PM
You. Are. Obsessed.
Every single goddamn thread that even looks remotely related to anything to do with genetics or DNA, you come in and shit all over it. We get it, you're a "scientific" racist. You have so very little to say that saying it once was enough. We all know what you think.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @11:23PM (2 children)
Awww, I enjoyed seeing his comment sit alone for so long. How about we just downmod his shit in the future and not engage, see how quickly he wigs out.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday February 02 2019, @03:19AM (1 child)
He's already modded to -1, everything he posts like that gets to -1 fairly quickly, and it doesn't seem to stop him. The guy's a complete fanatic. Unless and until we get permission to Spam mod him, or unless and until the staff wises up and bans him, nothing's going to change.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 04 2019, @10:16PM
Yeah I wouldn't expect any considerations of actual reality or even content, merely political agreement.