Ancient Yeast Used To Brew Modern Beer

Kozar_The_Malignant writes "Yeast trapped inside a 45 million year old weevil, trapped inside amber has been extracted, activated, and used to brew beer. According to the report, the beer has 'a weird spiciness at the finish.' The brewer, Raul Cano, a scientist at the California Polytechnic State University, attributes this to the yeast's unusual metabolism. 'The ancient yeast is restricted to a narrow band of carbohydrates, unlike more modern yeasts, which can consume just about any kind of sugar,' said Cano. Cano brews barrels of Pale Ale and German Wheat Beer under the Fossil Fuels Brewing Co. label."

Comments

Link to the brewer

[DeltaStorm]

http://www.fossilfuelsbrewingco.com/

If you want to try it looks like you're going to have to go to California.

wishful thinking?

[damn_registrars]

If we can do this with other multimillion-year-old spores, seeds, and other "deep freeze"-states of living creatures, we might be able to bring back some of Jurassic Park without resorting to cloning.

I suspect we'd be limited primarily to species that have a spore state. Bringing back old yeast is nowhere near as difficult as bringing back old vertebrates - yeast form spores to be able to sit out starvation indefinitely - I don't know many vertebrates that can do the same.

Without a spore stage, the degradation of DNA and cellular machinery could be severe, and even bringing back a vertebrate encased in amber could be excruciatingly difficult (if possible at all).

Re:wishful thinking?

[jd]

There is recent research which shows that you can de-specialize an adult stem cell and cause it to act as if it were an embryonic stem cell, but as things stand this is only theoretical, as far as I know. Nobody has perfected the conversion, certainly. If they had, genetic research could bypass the puritain nonsense entirely. I don't know what the current state-of-play is, in that, whether they've actually got an adult stem cell to produce something it couldn't normally produce, for example. I also see it as having limited interest until we know better more about what stem cells can be used for, medically. However, in the case of an extinct species, adult stem cells might be the best chance of revival, IF (and only if) conversion to embyonic stem cell state moves past the pure theory into the realm of the practical.

Standard nucleic DNA cloning has a very high failure rate and a very high juvenile death rate. I'm guessing that this is either nucleic DNA damage and/or a mismatch of some kind with the rest of the cell, including the mtDNA. The failure rate for species revival is likely to be considerably higher. Whatever is causing the failures is likely to be many times worse when you're dumping nucleic DNA into a far distant million-times-removed relative rather than something virtually identical from a genetic standpoint.

Ergo, if you want to revive an extinct species, your best bet depends utterly on research producing a reliable mechanism for generalizing adult stem cells, then obtaining such cells for an extinct organism. Dolly the sheep suffered from very rapid decay and wastage, using conventional cloning techniques. Embedding mammoth DNA into an elephant cell is a near-certain failure. But if appropriate stimulation forced a mammoth adult stem cell to become a mammoth embryonic stem cell, your odds of success should be much higher.

However, this isn't next week's technology we're talking about. The furthest I've heard of such work is, like I said, theoretical based on some observations. I don't expect to see sufficient progress to the point of actually seeing a clone produced by such a technique (ie: without a cellular host) for 30-50 years, based on my rule-of-thumb of 10 years per stage of development, adjusted for the current wave of conservatism, assuming such a clone is possible. If the method cannot be used in practice, I would not expect enough migration from theory to practice to take place to establish that beyond all doubt for 10-20 years. Allowing 10 years for another alternative path to be found, you'd then be looking at 50-80 years for cloning without the need of a host cell.

So, provided adult stem cells can be reverted, I can expect to live long enough to see a thoroughbred cloned Mammoth or something of that order of complexity - and still be cognicent enough to appreciate it, and might live long enough to see advanced regenerative medicine. If adult stem cells prove completely unusable and no other cell can be readily reverted, I would need to be extremely lucky to see anything much in the way of major results and certainly won't live long enough to see any medical benefits. So, naturally, I'm rather more eager to see cell reversion efforts achieve good results. Adult stem cells, being some of the least specialized of all cells in the body, should be the easiest to revert. Neurons - the sort of cell formed by default if no other stimulus is present - would logically be the next easiest, as it's very easy to subtract nothing, once nothing has been added.

(Those listing me as a foe on Slashdot would probably argue that, my case, nothing is exactly what my neurons consist of and that subtracting nothing would be amputating my brain. My teachers, back when I was at school, certainly would have argued that.)

Re:wishful thinking?

[jd]

We transfer only the nucleic DNA. Thus, if there are important interactions between the nucleic DNA and the mitochondrial DNA, we cannot produce those using the injection technique. We require a fully-intact stem cell. Secondly, such a transfer is itself risky - the more operations you perform on something delicate like that, the greater the probability of damaging it. Thus, if you can leave it in-situ, you greatly increase your odds of success.

With one major proviso.

If you want the DNA to operate in-situ, you HAVE to be able to convert the cell into an embryonic stem cell. Otherwise, you have nothing useful. If you can't move the DNA to a stem cell, then you obviously need to move the stem cell's characteristics to the DNA. This works, but only in theory. In practice, nobody knows how to despecialize cells in that way. It's possible - some tumours are variants on the theme - but the exact method of deprogramming is as yet beyond the experts in the field.

There is the other condition - the DNA has to start off by being intact - but that is true no matter what cloning method you use. Well, almost. We know how to chop DNA up, and we know how to sew fragments of DNA together. Although we can't do the latter process beyond a very small DNA fragment size, yet, it would in principle be possible to use this technique to take DNA over a wide range of samples and use intact fragments from one piece to fill in gaps from another. You merely need enough fragments for the statistics to work out that all gaps are filled. In the case of mammoths, where you have many animals and many cells in each and where preservation conditions are almost perfect, there is a very slim chance this may be possible. It's certainly better than zero. But again, the techniques for such mix-and-match lie well beyond what can currently be done in the laboratory. We just don't have the means to sew DNA fragments of that kind of size together at the present time. My estimate for how long it'll take is an estimate of the number of things that would need to be invented and how close we are to inventing each, assuming the standard rule of thumb that it takes about 10 years to get from a theory to a prototype, and another 10 to go from prototype to something viable, and assuming that some of those developments HAVE to be performed sequentially, not in parallel.

Since my estimate is in the region of 80 or so years, you can see I think there are many sequential operations that have to be performed before we have anything useful for cloning highly sophisticated species.

Re:hmmm

[X0563511]

You don't need to be a microbiologist to understand the spore state.

They did the same thing in 1995

[Danny Rathjens]

By "they", I mean the exact same guys. They first revived bacteria from a bee's stomach in 1993, and this article from 1995 mentions,

Cano and his colleagues claim to have built up a menagerie of 1500 ancient microorganisms, including bacteria, fungi and yeast, over the past three and a half years. A few weeks ago they toasted their success with beer brewed from dinosaur-age yeast, which they dubbed Jurassic Amber Ale (the first batch is described as "pretty bad", but there are hopes of better brews soon).

So apparently the news is that it doesn't taste as bad anymore for some strange reason? marketing? ;)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14619792.500-they-came-from-40-million-bc.html

Re:Ressurrecting a 45-million-year-old life form

[bluefoxlucid]

The beer has a different taste because they can't digest as many sugars, thus can't make as much alcohol from the sugars present; also because the yeast emits other intricate alcoholic esters not output by today's yeast. In effect, the beer has more full body; you need to use more sugar to make more alcohol, but the body will be far fuller than another beer of equivalent ABV.

Re:Ressurrecting a 45-million-year-old life form

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Million year old diseases are not going to be adapted to attack humans.

Actually the risk is worse for diseases that have just "made the hop" from another species and haven't yet adapted to keep the infected organism living. There's selection pressure to keep the victim alive, or alive longer, so as to spread more effectively, and becoming a long-term parasite or symbiont is better yet.

But I'm not particularly concerned: Current organisms have had millions of years to improve their defenses against all the pathological processes to which they've been exposed in the intervening times. I would not expect any useful biological attack strategy to have been completely lost and not "reinvented" over that time. Resurrected diseases are almost certain to be wimpybug, not superbug.

Re:Which CalPoly?

[Anonymous Coward]

When people say Cal Poly it usually refers to the one in SLO because that was the first one and it is more prestigious.

Re:hmmm

[Taibhsear]

It's not a seed. It's an endospore. Seeds are multicellular, these are single cells that have been biochemically altered to survive extremely harsh conditions (immense radiation, intense heat, extremely low humidity, vacuum, etc). Seeds and other organisms do not have this mechanism, only microorganisms do (AFAIK). The cell forms protective layers around some special proteins and the DNA, which is stabilized with calcium and dipicolinic acid, and dehydrates immensely. Without water and access to the DNA (since it is sort of cemented into place by the calcium and dipicolinic acid) the reactions that would degrade the DNA (like UV or X-ray light) cannot occur.

From wikipedia:
"Up to 15% of the dry weight of the endospore consists of calcium dipicolinate within the core, which is thought to stabilize the DNA. Dipicolinic acid could be responsible for the heat resistance of the spore, and calcium may aid in resistance to heat and oxidizing agents."