Fun story. I worked at a large food tech company. For products like Yoghurt you’d like Bactria that make the yogurt very quickly at high temp. But grow as slowly as possible at low temp (stays fresh longer).
They’d mutate the s out of these Bacteria, in smart calculated ways. A basepair here, a gene there. When they hit a jack pot. They’d document the mutations, throw the engineered strain out and start blasting them with UV. Afterwards you just scan for the same mutations and voila, now it’s classical strain enhancement!
Same was done for yeast for all kinds of food applications.
There is something to be said for it because you never need antibiotic resistance for selection that way. But you also don’t really know what you are doing and you could edit the resistance genes out. Anyway, this was >20 years ago. Maybe they do it differently now.
For anyone else wondering, I learned that in order to naturally create bacteria that aren’t going to be labelled GMO, you can blast regular bacteria with UV, then look for the ones with the same mutations as the engineered ones (with desirable traits), and now you can legally use the “natural” bacteria in Non-GMO labelled products.
Putting my personal views (from a consumption pov) on this topic aside, that is some clever “engineering”.
Since as far as I understand the UV light also acts as a mutagen, wonder if you could potentially create some interesting new yeast strains for brewing.
It might also be interesting to use a dye to highlight dead cells.
Fun story. I worked at a large food tech company. For products like Yoghurt you’d like Bactria that make the yogurt very quickly at high temp. But grow as slowly as possible at low temp (stays fresh longer).
They’d mutate the s out of these Bacteria, in smart calculated ways. A basepair here, a gene there. When they hit a jack pot. They’d document the mutations, throw the engineered strain out and start blasting them with UV. Afterwards you just scan for the same mutations and voila, now it’s classical strain enhancement!
Same was done for yeast for all kinds of food applications.
There is something to be said for it because you never need antibiotic resistance for selection that way. But you also don’t really know what you are doing and you could edit the resistance genes out. Anyway, this was >20 years ago. Maybe they do it differently now.
Wow. My mind is truly blown.
For anyone else wondering, I learned that in order to naturally create bacteria that aren’t going to be labelled GMO, you can blast regular bacteria with UV, then look for the ones with the same mutations as the engineered ones (with desirable traits), and now you can legally use the “natural” bacteria in Non-GMO labelled products.
Putting my personal views (from a consumption pov) on this topic aside, that is some clever “engineering”.
Thanks for sharing, this is fascinating
How can you scan millions of things looking for one or two that have a mutation?
Since as far as I understand the UV light also acts as a mutagen, wonder if you could potentially create some interesting new yeast strains for brewing.
It might also be interesting to use a dye to highlight dead cells.
Part 2: https://chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com/p/my-uv-experiment-...