Experts report that, in light of summer, athletes should be careful to avoid hyponatremia, a condition that comes from consuming too much liquid,
You probably remember from trivia night at the bar that the ancient Sumerians were the first to brew beer – some 6,000 years ago. But what about lager? It’s a bit harder to determine, but thankfully genetics is able to help. With state of the art sequencing, researchers were able to track the yeast used for making popular lager to the German province of Bavaria in the mid-15th century Bavaria.
Saccharromyces cerevisiae, a highly versatile yeast has been the choice ingredient in ales, wine and bread for millennia. Bavarian brewers learned something new in the 15th century, however, when they realized that the brew they kept in caves for the winter kept fermenting.
A lighter and smoother beer was the result, which grew in its popularity, spreading to the nearby Czech kingdom of Bohemia. The lager would gradually take over the market – from the middle of the 19th and into the 20th century, accounting for 94 percent of beers sold across the globe.
Lager yeasts are currently made from a hybrid of two different strains of yeast – S. cerevisiae and S. eubayanus, the latter of which was discovered back in 2011.
To conduct their study, the researchers analyzed a recently described species of wild yeast from Patagonia – the Saccharomyces eubayanus. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, researchers sequenced a high-quality genome for S. eubayanus with the help of next-generation sequencing technology. From S. eubaynus, they were able to isolate traits found in the domesticated hybrids, that are used in brewing lager.
It made way for the first opportunity to study the full genomes of both parental yeast strains found in lager beer.
The study revealed that yeast domestication for making lager and most beers has put strains of yeast on the same evolutionary trajectory a number of times.
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