That Stinky Cheese is a Result of Evolutionary Overdrive

Did you know that cheese makers use a particular species of mold to come up with the many cheese flavors we eat today? Have you also thought about the genetic histories of mold and how it adapts to life on cheese curds?

Dr. Robert Rodriquez de la Vega and his scientists reported to the journal Current Biology, that cheese makers have thrown their mold into evolutionary drive. Roquefort was one of the first cheeses made in France in a traditional way. The cheese makers used to take loaves of bread and leave in caves. Inside of them Penicillium roquefort would grow on the walls and eventually attack the bread. Then they would take of pieces of the bread and put them on the curds, so the mold would grow on them. In the early 1900s scientists identified what these species were and made it possible for scientists in the laboratories to select certain strains of mold to produce cheese. Could this mean that mold is a genetically modified organism?

Over centuries, mold has picked up large chunks of DNA from other species in order to adapt on cheese curds. Dr. Rodriquez de la Vega and his colleagues were curious about how mold changed once people started using them to make cheese. They were able to see the similarities of these genes, but also noticed chunks of DNA that did not look similar. The genes that looked different were actually genes that were an identical form of distantly relative species. This kind of swapping is called horizontal gene transfer. Horizontal gene transfer is when one organism takes a piece of DNA from another species and creates it own genome. Dr. Rodriquez de la Vega found out that up to 5 percent of the entire genome of each mold was made up of DNA from another species. So this means that new flavors are able to be made, but also gives mold that contaminate cheese a chance to spread and pick up modified genes.

In opinion, I always wanted to know how the different cheese flavors came about. I am only familiar with the common cheeses like cheddar, provolone, american, and pepper jack. I have never seen cheese that was blue, but had an acquired taste like roqueforti. It is interesting how mold can alter genes and change the either the texture of cheese or even its appearance. I also wonder in what ways can cheesemakers protect their cheese from contamination. Can the modified genes be reversed, so the cheese is no longer contaminated?

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