The prospect of yeast-by-design is tantalizing for many researchers in the brewing industry.
Man-made yeasts could irreversibly change everything from the biofuel to the brewing industry. A team of geneticists led by Jef Boeke at Johns Hopkins University is genetically engineering a yeast from scratch, as part of the Synthetic Yeast 2.0 project. They have designed and written a code made up of roughly 11 million letters of DNA—the As, Cs, Gs, and Ts that write the book of life—which they are synthesizing and subbing in for a yeast’s natural DNA.
