Slashdot Mirror
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."
Even more interesting is we now have successfully ressurrected a life form that was presumably dormant for 45 million years.
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Man, that's going to be one malty beer!
I'm wondering what this yeast's brewing profile is. Could it lager? What's it attenuation?
An interesting achievement and a even neater application of science!
import system.cool.Sig;
At present, the record for retrieving completely intact yDNA is 3,000 years, and the record for completely intace mitochondrial DNA (from inside the hair of a Mammoth) is 10,000 years, although older fragments have been recovered. Jurassic Park is therefore unlikely, but Neolithic Park would appear well within reach. (That might raise some interesting ethical questions. How human does one have to be to be considered as qualifying for human rights?)
The only way to not have to clone an extinct creature would be if you could recover an intact, viable stem cell. In principle, this is no different from recovering any other single-celled organism, and we've recovered those just fine. Most animals - humans included - have many sources of stem cells, the skin included, which could be exploited to make something that acted like an embryonic stem cell. It's not easy - as I understand the subject, it's never been accomplished, merely proven theoretically possible. Gotta start somewhere, though.
The idea that a few skin cells might be trapped in amber is an interesting one. A strand of hair (for obtaining the DNA and using regular cloning) also seems a possibility, assuming there was much in the way of hair at the different times amber has been formed. (Baltic amber is considered the most interesting, but there are many others. Recently did some research on amber, owing to a Bronze Age find in England of an amber necklace and pendant in a region that couldn't possibly have been rich enough on its own merits to have bought such stuff.)
Personally, though, Jurassic Park ideas seem like a fun-for-a-moment sort of thing, soon to be forgotten. A one trick show where the trick looked better in the movies. I'd be much more interested in chemists and biologists figuring out what differences there must have been in the DNA of the trees that produced Baltic Amber and modern pines. You don't need to recreate the ancient trees, you only need to create a tree that produces sap with the same chemistry. Then put the sap under pressure, and produce (nearly) instant ancient amber. Ideally, you'd destroy the market for the really ancient stuff, so biologists and microbiologists can more easily obtain the stuff to look for interesting bugs, leaves and beer yeasts.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I think you mean EPOCH ALE
Why does my coffee mug smell like trout?
I'm proud that slashdotters have avoided the obvious Bea Arthur joke.
It is election season, yet no McCain jokes thus far. He even got his start in politics with his wive's beer money.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
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.
Point to be made here: Adult stem cells are being used for regenerative treatments because doing so with embryonic stem cells is known to be a colossal waste of time. It's one of those things where we know it's doable, but it's extremely hard and unreliable, and we insist on doing it for political reasons mixed with "because we can!"
Here's a list of things I've seen done with Adult Stem Cells:
There's a lot out there that basically involves pulling stem cells from your body in one place and injecting them somewhere else. Embryonic treatments of course involve a lot of chemical environment manipulation to make something that wants to become a whole person become a simple tissue; and the DNA is different, so you'd need immune system suppression drugs to prevent rejection (read: chemical-induced AIDS). I think I've heard of adult stem cells regenerating bits of skin with hair and muscle attached, for skin grafts, in a dish, i.e. a fully constructed tissue (like an arm or hand, but not quite there yet). A tooth is an example of this (complex organ) but it's not a great example.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Unwanted yeasts and bacteria can get easily out of hand. And being that this particular yeast strain might thrive in environments different from those of modern yeasts, it could very well grow more populous in the intervening period between brews. And if it's that disruptive to brewing, who's to say how it would impact the rest of life around it. Now apply that to 'other multimillion-year-old spores, seeds, and other "deep freeze"-states of living creatures'.
Evolution doesn't reward "better" anything except "better suited to particular circumstances." That could be wildly unpredictable for species that fell by the wayside, as it's not always predictable how they fell by the wayside in the first place.
Any species with a dependence on another will die off when that other species does, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be better suited to species that have thrived since that time.