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

Ressurrecting a 45-million-year-old life form

[davidwr]

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.

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

[bcrowell]

I have a friend who's a yeast biologist at a university. I thought this was totally cool (I'm a homebrewer), so I got all excited and emailed him about it. He'd seen the paper, and said he was skeptical about whether the thing they'd cultured was actually an ancient yeast. IIRC he said that there were two main modern lineages of yeast, and they split from a common ancestor a long time ago (more than 45 Mya). It's not clear that you can really tell whether a particular yeast is from 45 Mya or not. Just because they cultured it from a sample that was that old, that doesn't mean the yeast spores had really been dormant for all that time. It could be a modern yeast that happened to be living in the old sample. Yeast live all over the place. In Belgium, they traditionally brew certain types of beer just by leaving the stuff in an open vat next to a window, and whatever gets in, that's what ferments it. In the past, a lot of it was probably yeast living on the skins of fruit in nearby orchards. These days it may be living in the walls and equipment of the brewery. Given that the stuff is all over the place, it's not obvious how you'd know whether or not a particular sample was contaminated with modern yeast.

Re:wishful thinking?

[bluefoxlucid]

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:

• Repair scarred heart tissue after a heart attack, by injection of bone marrow stem cells into the heart (they can differentiate into muscle) and stopping the heart for a couple minutes to allow a graft. Also seen this done in other ways, with blood and skeletal muscle stem cells.
• Repair of damaged spinal tissue by adult stem cells harvested from umbilical cord blood at birth (cures paralysis)
• Repair of a damaged cornea (even acid damaged) by pulling stem cells from another part of the eye and grafting them into the damaged cornea.
• Temporary treatment of diabetes, something like 80% success in a study involving over 100 diabetics, where 'success' was defined pretty much as the patients being able to go a year without needing insulin to handle spikes in blood sugar. Some tests with mice have shown the ability to completely reverse diabetes with spleen stem cells.
• Someone fully regenerated a heart after killing off all the muscle tissue, leaving just structural support tissue. Not sure the details on this one. I've seen a lot of muscle regeneration work done by "scaffolding" with a synthetic support tissue.
• Osirus has a treatment for damaged joint cartilage.
• Osiris also has a full, selected tooth regeneration technique working in lab, where they can generate a tooth bud and set it in a mouth and it will sprout into a tooth, take root, send out hormones to have blood vessels run to it, etc.

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.