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.
For sourdough and breadmaking, I always find it funny how recipes and tips make out like yeast is almost delicate and hard to keep happy when we know yeast is super tough. It can survive drying, cold/freezing, high pressure, having no food for a long time, up to 50C heat, and more.
It's also easy and cheap to run experiments too like mixing salt directly with the yeast and seeing it doesn't make a noticeable difference to breadmaking, yet the myths persist.
A local apple farm and cider mill uses UV for pasteurization of their cider instead of heat. I use it to make hard cider, and it's as good as unpasteurized cider (no longer legal to sell in NY) was, and I don't have to use sulfites to kill off wild yeast.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 33.0 ms ] threadIt might also be interesting to use a dye to highlight dead cells.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening
They still do it in Japan, with a distinctive circular field that has a radioactive isotope tower in the center
https://www.naro.affrc.go.jp/archive/nias/eng/org/GR/IRB/
It's also easy and cheap to run experiments too like mixing salt directly with the yeast and seeing it doesn't make a noticeable difference to breadmaking, yet the myths persist.