{"id":144271,"date":"2022-08-16T15:23:46","date_gmt":"2022-08-16T20:23:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/humans-tamed-the-microbes-behind-cheese-soy-and-more"},"modified":"2022-08-16T15:23:46","modified_gmt":"2022-08-16T20:23:46","slug":"humans-tamed-the-microbes-behind-cheese-soy-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/humans-tamed-the-microbes-behind-cheese-soy-and-more","title":{"rendered":"Humans tamed the microbes behind cheese, soy, and more"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/humans-tamed-the-microbes-behind-cheese-soy-and-more2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Somerville and John Gibbons, a genomicist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, independently focused on food fermentation, which helped early farmers and herders transform fresh produce and milk into products that can last months or years. Gibbons took a close look at the genome of <em>Aspergillus oryzae<\/em>, the fungus that jump-starts production of sake from rice and soy sauce and miso from soybeans.<\/p>\n<p>When farmers cultivate <em>A. oryzae<\/em>, the fungus\u2014a eukaryote, with its DNA enclosed in a nucleus\u2014reproduces on its own. But when humans take a little finished sake and transfer it to a rice mash to begin fermentation anew, they also transfer cells of the fungal strains that evolved and survived best during the first round of fermentation.<\/p>\n<p>Gibbons compared the genomes of scores of <em>A. oryzae <\/em>strains with those of their wild ancestor, <em>A. flavus<\/em>. Over time, he found, selection by humans had boosted <em>A. oryzae<\/em>\u2019s ability to break down starches and to tolerate the alcohol produced by fermentation. \u201cThe restructuring of metabolism appears to be a hallmark of domestication in fungi,\u201d he reported last week at Microbe 2022, the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. For example, domesticated <em>Aspergillus <\/em>strains may have up to five times more copies of a gene for metabolizing starches as their ancestor\u2014\u201ca brilliant way for evolution to turn up this enzyme,\u201d Wolfe says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Somerville and John Gibbons, a genomicist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, independently focused on food fermentation, which helped early farmers and herders transform fresh produce and milk into products that can last months or years. Gibbons took a close look at the genome of Aspergillus oryzae, the fungus that jump-starts production of sake from [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,385,1506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-evolution","category-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}