EUROPE: Scientists use DNA to figure out a lot of useful stuff: whether a drug will work to fight a certain form of cancer, who committed a crime, the ancient history of a fragment of fossilized bone.
Now, a team led by biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are putting genetic analysis to work to get to the bottom of a different sort of compelling question: the evolution of lager beer.
Sequencing the DNA of a recently discovered type of yeast believed to be key to brewing lagers, University of Wisconsin-Madison evolutionary geneticist Chris Todd Hittinger and colleagues were able to identify genetic signatures of domestication in modern lager yeast. They were also able to resolve a question about the two major lager yeast lineages, Frohberg and Saaz, discovering that the two had separate origins, not a single precursor, as some groups had hypothesized.
The researchers’ study was published last week in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.
Hittinger and colleagues have been circling the globe for years chasing the origins of lager, a long-standing mystery. For centuries, people had brewed ale using the same type of yeast they used to make wine and to bake bread: a species known as Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Eventually, around the 15th century, Bavarian monks found a way to make lager in cooler temperatures, using a hybridized yeast. But no one was sure what other yeast strain had mixed with the ale yeast to make the lager hybrid.
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