Crowd Sourcing SuperYeast

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Climate change is bringing about huge alterations in the way we produce our food and drink. Notably, there have already been significant effects on the wine industry whereby increased temperatures result in grapes with more sugar in their juice. When yeast are added to this to make wine, the sugar acts to dehydrate them and they can die. More sugar also means more alcohol once it has been converted by yeast in a process called fermentation. The problem here is that alcohol kills yeast, for the same reason you can use alcohol wipes or hand gel to sanitise. The yeast die before all of the sugar is used up, leading to a much sweeter, less well-flavoured wine. Wineries can add additional yeast that are able to survive in the high alcohol and turn the sugar into flavour molecules, but there are few yeast able to survive in these harsh conditions. To protect the future of wine production, we need yeast that are able to survive in these stressful conditions; there are potentially thousands of relatively-uncharacterised strains throughout the UK.We have ongoing research to generate such yeast but we want to use an approach of "Crowd Sourcing SuperYeast" where the public will donate yeast samples from beer, cider, bread, wine etc. and we will test these for their ability to survive in these harsh conditions. Participants will be provided with a swab and instructions for sampling, along with prepaid packaging to return the samples to Aston University. Our researchers will then test the strains to identify "SuperYeast". The "strongest" yeast against sugar and ethanol stresses will be ranked on a leader board available on the internet which will be updated on a weekly basis. At the end of the four month project, we will invite all participants and the general public to attend an event where we will have discussions about the science behind the project, the outcomes and allow people to test their yeast strains themselves. The participants on the leader board will all receive prizes. The idea is to get people involved in the science, gather a large number of strains for testing, and to open a dialogue about the role of yeast and other organisms in biotechnology such as food and beverage production.