Pictured above is an orange colored gall which is responsible for harboring the species of yeast that is used to make lager beer. Thanks to a brand new method, interspecies yeast hybrids (like the ones used to make lager beer) are now able to be made in the lab easily. This means that the makers of beer, wine, biofuels, and many other products will now soon have other strains of the yeast species to work with.
This discovery is great because an interspecies hybrid of yeast has a one in a billion chance of appearing in nature which means that waiting on nature to create the next new yeast is not very efficient. Now in a laboratory they can achieve a hybrid in about one in a thousand cells.
Currently popular strains of yeast used to make beer and wine tend to be sterile which means they can't create spores and therefore can't make more of themselves to continue making the beer and wine. With the new interspecies hybrids and the use of plasmids, a trait to make the popular yeast strain fertile could be implanted into the DNA of the popular yeast.
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