Crowd Sourcing SuperYeast

气候变化正在给我们生产食物和饮料的方式带来巨大的变化。值得注意的是，温度的升高已经对葡萄酒行业产生了重大影响，导致葡萄的汁液中含有更多的糖。当酵母加入其中酿造葡萄酒时，糖会使它们脱水，它们可能会死亡。更多的糖也意味着更多的酒精，一旦它在一个被称为发酵的过程中被酵母转化。这里的问题是酒精会杀死酵母菌，因为同样的原因，你可以使用酒精湿巾或手胶来消毒。酵母在所有的糖都用完之前就死了，导致了一种更甜、味道不那么好的葡萄酒。酿酒厂可以添加额外的酵母，这些酵母能够在高酒精中生存，并将糖转化为风味分子，但能够在这种恶劣条件下生存的酵母很少。为了保护葡萄酒生产的未来，我们需要能够在这些压力条件下生存的酵母；整个英国可能有数千种相对不同的菌株。我们正在进行研究来产生这种酵母，但我们想使用一种“大众采购超级一年”的方法，即公众将捐赠来自啤酒、苹果酒、面包、葡萄酒等的酵母样本，我们将测试它们在这些恶劣条件下的生存能力。参赛者将获得一根棉签和采样说明，以及预付费包装，以便将样品退回阿斯顿大学。然后，我们的研究人员将对这些菌株进行测试，以确定是“SuperYEast”。对糖和乙醇压力“最强”的酵母将被列入互联网上的排行榜，该排行榜将每周更新一次。在四个月的项目结束时，我们将邀请所有参与者和普通公众参加一个活动，在那里我们将讨论项目背后的科学问题，结果，并允许人们自己测试他们的酵母菌株。排行榜上的参与者都将获得奖品。这个想法是为了让人们参与到科学中来，收集大量的菌株进行测试，并就酵母和其他生物在食品和饮料生产等生物技术中的作用展开对话。

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.