New York Times explores the mapping of a new genome, as researchers chart a family tree of craft beer:
After thousands of years of unwitting domestication, brewing yeasts — the microorganisms that ferment a brewer’s tepid slop of grain, water and hops into beer — are as diverse as the beer they make. And now two research teams, from White Labs and a Belgian genetics laboratory, are mapping out their sprawling genealogy, creating the first genetic family tree for brewing yeasts and the beers they make.
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By getting a line-by-line reading of the 12 million molecules that make up the DNA of each yeast, Dr. [Keith] Verstrepen said, the researchers will be able not only to tell how closely related two yeasts are (is Sam Adams’s closer to Stone’s, or Sierra Nevada’s?) but to answer other important questions: which breweries started with the same strains of yeasts, how these organisms evolved over time and, of course, how all of it translates to taste.
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The researchers in the Belgian lab — a joint venture of the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology and the University of Leuven, Belgium — have even bigger plans. “With this information, we’ll be able to select different properties in yeasts and breed them together to generate new ones,” Dr. Verstrepen said. “In a few years we might be drinking beers that are far different and more interesting than those that currently exist.”