Ancient Yeast Used To Brew Modern Beer 106
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."
I'm proud of slashdotters (Score:3, Funny)
I'm proud that slashdotters have avoided the obvious Bea Arthur joke.
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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.
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I guess that's fair, though it also seems fair to say that McCain's "start in politics" was earlier--with his first job in the senate in '77.
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--with his first job in the senate in '77.
1777?
He! . .
Ressurrecting a 45-million-year-old life form (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Interesting...that's exactly what Dr. Ian Malcolm keeps saying!
Re:Ressurrecting a 45-million-year-old life form (Score:5, Funny)
Who cares what he says.
Never trust people who come back from the dead, that's what I always say... From snarky scientists to pacifistic carpenters, zombies will lead you wrong every time!
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I can't imagine that bringing back specimens from millenia ago is going to be very prudent.
Well, at least not at this juncture.
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Considering how disruptive it can be to introduce species from other geographic regions, I can't imagine that bringing back specimens from millenia ago is going to be very prudent.
I'm not too worried.
The rest of the biosphere has had megayears of the Red Queen's Race to get better at offense and defense - especially with chemical warfare and intelligence. A resurrected fossil - even with resurrections of its ecological support network to help out - is still likely to be at a severe disadvantage. The probl
As a brewer... (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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The rest of the biosphere has had megayears of the Red Queen's Race to get better at offense and defense - especially with chemical warfare and intelligence.
Evolutionary progress isn't exactly linear. Maintaining a defense against a no-longer-existent threat is not really advantageous. Megayears of evolution might have eliminated current species' defenses against this yeast while developing defenses against things which are still present. That's what evolution is! It's about adapting to the environment,
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wishful thinking? (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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You know what else has a spore state! Shrooms man! ..and I bet there was mycelial networks the size of Russia.
Shrooms must have been huge 45 million years ago!
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You know what else has a spore state! Shrooms man! ..and I bet there was mycelial networks the size of Russia.
Shrooms must have been huge 45 million years ago!
What are you trying to say? Were you shrooming when you were writing that?
Re:wishful thinking? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Creating tissue/bone/organ: Adult stem cell.
Creating whole organism: Embryonic stem cell.
These are not interchangeable. Embryonic stem cells have to develop into a completed organism embryo to provide useful adult stem cells; and adult stem cells... I don't know if regressing certain marrow stem cells to a totipotent stem cell is feasible, but I'd believe it. As-is, it's definitely not going to just grow a new organism.
Re:wishful thinking? (Score:4, Informative)
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.)
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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,
Re:wishful thinking? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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The idea of being able to convert adult stem cells into embryonic stem cells would be that you'd have all the benefits you've listed for adult stem cells (as that's what you start off with) but increased flexibility (as the embryonic form would be able to be used to generate tissue adult stem cells can't), and you'd not have the rejection issue as it's from the same person, so the DNA is all the same. This is why the conversion process is so important. Essentially adult stem cells are embryonic stem cells w
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The West African Black Rhino went extinct two-to-five years ago, or thereabouts. The Yahtzee River Dolphin went extinct in about the same timeframe. The Tasmanian Tiger went extinct something like 80-100 years ago. The Moa and Haast Eagle went extinct 100-200 years ago. The wolves and wild boar native to Britain went extinct around 500 years ago, the re-introduction efforts are using nearest kin.
All of these could potentially be recovered - or, if not recovered in full, recovered to some degree.
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"Drink Dino Beer: made from yeast from a dead weevil's anus - but with a unique spicy finish!"
"Dino Beer: for when beer made from modern yeast, genetically-modified wheat, and bicylic polyphenols just isn't good enough!"
"Dino Beer, because Coors, you're 45 million years too late!"
and "Dino Beer has the electrolytes plants crave! Now at Costco!"
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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).
But multicelled animals provide multiple copies of their DNA. Multiple samples can be sequenced and error-correction computations performed to arrive at an error-free transcription.
Once you have that you can use the same techniques that are currently being developed for cloning a copy of a modern organism from a sam
genomics 2.0 was:Re:wishful thinking? (Score:2)
But multicelled animals provide multiple copies of their DNA. Multiple samples can be sequenced and error-correction computations performed to arrive at an error-free transcription.
Now I for one certainly wouldn't oppose doing a (insert extinct animal species here) genome project for as many extinct animals as possible. However, as someone with genomics experience, I can say it is a very long and involved process just to sequence a genome.
And then on top of that, your proposal would then involve progressing on to building new chromosomes from the sequenced data - because just rebuilding broken chromosomes could introduce potentially crippling error rates.
So unfortunately, I don'
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yeast form spores to be able to sit out starvation indefinitely - I don't know many vertebrates that can do the same.
Calista Flockhart seems to pull it off just fine.
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I suspect we'd be limited primarily to species that have a spore state.
It's not so much that it has a spore state, as much as it comes with SecuROM DRM.
:P
Sorry, was that in poor taste?
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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
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might be able to bring back some of Jurassic Park without resorting to cloning.
So they can drink your brain with a straw-like appendage??
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we might be able to bring back some of Jurassic Park without resorting to cloning.
I for one vote that before we bring anything else back, we must determine if it can be made into a delicious adult beverage. I say if I can't get totally hammered drunk on these creatures (or their waste as in this case), let them stay in the past.
Re:Ressurrecting a 45-million-year-old life form (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Ressurrecting a 45-million-year-old life form (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh please... (Score:2)
No way is a little thing like life more interesting that beer.
Finally! (Score:1, Funny)
Something that applies to "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."!! :)
The cages (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully they won't figure out how to open the doors.
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Stand back. I'm going to try Science! (Score:2)
Actually, I'm kind of curious how they were able to revive the yeast. That feat alone makes the article interesting. The beer is just a good finish to a hard day's work at the lab.
The comment in the article about the yeast possibly evolving to metabolize a greater range of carbohydrates reminded me of the E-coli evolution experiment that recently garnered renewed attention [slashdot.org] when a major evolutionary change occured after about 30,000 generations.
Head (Score:1, Funny)
--
Oh Well, Bad Karma and all . . .
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"I think my sexual innuendo detector just went off inadvertently."
I think they make a pill for that now. Or a session with a hooker, only they call it "sexual surrogate therapy" and insurance pays for it.
Re:Head (Score:5, Funny)
It depends on how many you can convince her to drink.
MODS! (Score:2)
Link to the brewer (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.fossilfuelsbrewingco.com/ [fossilfuelsbrewingco.com]
If you want to try it looks like you're going to have to go to California.
Transforms less sugars, eh? (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
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Mmmm. Beer. (Score:2, Funny)
*burp*
hmmm (Score:1)
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You don't need to be a microbiologist to understand the spore state [wikipedia.org].
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It's like saying "a mountain bike is a bicycle that allows riders to travel over rough terrain" and it turns out the mountain bike in question can travel over land, sea, the vacuum of space, and the semi-liquid/semi-gasseous atmosphere of Jupiter.
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What's going to degrade it? The contents of the spore are almost totally isolated from the outside environment. They're just chemicals. The spore state shuts down all the normal chemical reactions. If they're stable, they sit there, inert, pretty much forever — just like the amber itself. Other living things decay because they're smashed open, because other chemicals leech in, because other bacteria come along and eat them, etc. If that doesn't happen to the spore, its contents are safe for a lo
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The thick outer coating helps a lot in keeping the spore contents isolated. Normal cells that are preserved in organisms don't have that, and they don't necessarily shut their metabolisms down ahead of time, so they're biochemically not "prepared" for preservation the way spores are. I'm not saying spores are immortal, but they're much more robust to environmental perturbations than just about anything else we know.
Not really disagreeing with you, 45 million years is still impressive, but perhaps it's not
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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 (si
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Endospore is only seen with bacteria, unfortunatly Yeast is a fungus. Specifically, an ascomycota [wikipedia.org] - the spore in question is an ascospore [wikipedia.org].
They did the same thing in 1995 (Score:5, Informative)
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 [newscientist.com]
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They could have found it's sweet spot for temperature and pressure range too, along with the necessary ingredient combination. The taste has a lot more variables than just the yeast. Nevermind that this might be a completely different yeast.
Which CalPoly? (Score:2, Funny)
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When people say Cal Poly it usually refers to the one in SLO because that was the first one and it is more prestigious.
Let me be the first to say... (Score:1)
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Beeeeeeer (Score:2)
Biological Warfare (Score:2)
This is kinda disturbing. If an alien race wants to take us over, will they just put something in an alcoholic drink and claim that it will give us a high like never before? We wouldn't be able to resist. "Sure, it's melting my face off. But oh, what a clean finish!"
Kidding aside, how did this guy know that a 45 Million year old yeast wouldn't, you know, kill him? If it's that old it couldn't have been used (and therefore proven safe) by our ancestors--that way predates human evolution. Couldn't it ha
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What sugars, specifically? (Score:2)
Um, I thought the whole point of adding lactose and dextrins was that yeast (modern or not) can't eat that stuff, so you get to keep some sugar in your fermented beer (for body). Isn't (even modern) yeast limited to eating the really simple sugars (glucose and maltose)?
Maybe this ancient yeast can't even handle maltose or something?
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Beer? Lightweights.... (Score:2)
Beer, hell. What does the BREAD taste like? (Score:2)
This could produce a new bread flavor, as different from baker's yeast and sourdough breads as they are from each other.
One of the few times... (Score:2)
Take ancient DNA to make dinosaur clones to rule the world? or ancient super diseases? or morally questionable practices? Nope, "Hey I know! Let's make beer out of it!" There are very very few times I love my country. This is definitely one of them. I would love 2 bottles of this. One to try, one as a souvenir.
Safety? (Score:2)
Couldn't this be as dangerous as stuff from space? Millions of years might have been plenty of time for us to LOSE an immunity to something.
It begs the question "Did you make sure it was safe before drinking it?".
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No, it doesn't beg any question. Begging the question = circular reasoning.
Some more info here (Score:2)
Seems like it is also called "Tyrannosaurus-Rat beer" or "T-Rat beer" for short. Somehow that was also lost to marketing I suppose:
http://calpolynews.calpoly.edu/magazine/Spring-08/ancient-ale.html [calpoly.edu]
(from the link of their front page at the right bottom).
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And google (+firefox search) is your friend, somebody seemed to like it:
The Tyrannosaurus Rat was an unbelieveable blend of hefe and Belgian Ale. One of the most delicious beers in the world.
http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/c1c37/b7cfa/2/ [virtualtourist.com]
Hmm, 45 MILLION years old? (Score:2)
It just doesn't sound like a great idea. I'd wait a few months and see how the first guys to have a drink are doing.
Weird Spiciness (Score:1)
Yeast from the gut of a Weevil (Score:2)
So the yeast from the gut of a 45M Year old weevil is restricted to a narrow band of carbohydrates compared to modern yeast.
But have they compared it to yest from the guts of current day Weevils?