(Translated by Claudia Alderman)
Global yeast?
Recalling of the movie Jurassic Park, one wonders about the potential dangers of reviving an ancient pathological microbe that could produce a modern plague. "There exists the possibility," he says, but Carvajal thinks that these species have been living with man for thousands of years." Indeed, that suspicion proved to be true.
Simultaneously, on the other side of the globe two cases of bottled tea were found clouded with contamination in 2010. The manufacturer sent the bottles to Ching-Fu Lee at the National Hsinchu University of Education, one of the few yeast taxonomists in Taiwan. He identified the contaminant as a new species of Candida and began to write a paper describing his discovery. During the peer review process, the anonymous reviewer suggested that Lee check the National Institutes of Health GenBank database. There he found the genetic sequence of the new species of Candida that Carvajal had recovered from the ancient fermentation vessel. Lee immediately contacted Carvajal, along with the latter's collaborator Stephen James, a yeast taxonomist at the Institute of Food Research in England, and the three teams of scientists jointly published their paper in the February issue of the International Journal of Food Microbiology.
But how did the identical yeast turn up simultaneously in Taiwan and Quito? "I don't think this is a beverage-related yeast, I think it is a human-related yeast," Carvajal says. "We know now that there were contacts between Polynesians and South American peoples. [Polynesians] departed from Taiwan 6,000 years ago."
Carvajal cites the example of another new yeast he has discovered, C. fodens, to buttress his argument. The yeast was collected in Australia, Costa Rica and Ecuador's Galápagos Islands. Genetic analysis shows that the yeast from all three Pacific locations are identical. "It is very hard to imagine that such a distance was covered by one single strain," he says. "This yeast is tightly associated with the flowers of the sweet potatoes. This probably has some relation with human migration, because we know that sweet potatoes come from the Andes. We are using yeasts to track human migration and contacts. That is part of what we call 'microbiological archaeology.'"
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14 Comments
Add CommentThe slide with the very short mummies is confounding without an explanation - what is that a picture of? It's not them, is it full scale, PC generated; what? By itself, it is macabre.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI object to the word "new" to qualify this "discovery"; the writer states, "he coaxed a community of yeasts, which had lain dormant in the entombed vessels since A.D. 680, back to life." By definition, new is never-before. Coaxed BACK to life; they're old, not new. It's not a discovery, it's a stumble into the past, serendipity. You cannot bring something back to life and call it new! "Look, here for the second time - I mean first time, this new, recently dead thing."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe bones from this tomb have been removed to a museum for study and replaced with manikins to show how the bodies were found in the fetal position. Many other tombs here are still undergoing excavation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisC. thea is a new species based on genetic sequencing and molecular biological analysis and it is recorded as such in the paper published this week in the scientific journal cited in the article. This is not the first time a new species thought to be extinct has subsequently been found alive. The coelacanth (an ancient lobe fin fish) is a famous example of this. The yeast does not form spores. It was not viable without the specialized process Dr. Carvajal has devised to revive ancient yeast. The process involves rehydrating the cells,repairing the damaged cell membrane, and restarting their metabolism.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDarwinian/Mendelian evolution includes microbes, the dominant form of life on Earth. This is not a new species of Candida but a phase in the evolution of the Candida microbial breed that we have identified in modern times to date. Some phases in microbial evolution have become extinct, as we well know happened with primate fossils, such as Lucy. Anti-microbial pharmaceuticals have speeded up microbial evolution, so that many microbes can now defend themselves against what we see, with our limited knowledge, as old-line antibiotics, for example, that really haven't been around that long. Some modern microbes have learned to thicken their cell wall when attacked and/or to bombard the antibiotic molecule with an enzyme that snips off its tail, crippling it. Giving rise to an ID wisecrack that some bugs today are smarter than the drugs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSign me up for a growler! Hold the human feces though.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs stated in the article, the bodies were found in the fetal position, which is why they appear "short". What was not stated, but was probably true, is that the bodies were dessicated (and then wrapped) before interment, which is why the bodies appear to be less bulky than you would expect from being in the fetal position.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs someone else has so verbosely pointed out, "new" has multiple meanings, and in this context means "previously unknown or undecribed by science". The headline is perfectly accurate, if easily misconstrued by the scientifically illiterate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisR. Douglas Fields, very impressive report about some very impressive work.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt seems to me, unhygienic eating habits alone with near starvation, from time to time, are the circumstances that give us alcoholic beverages! No doubt such was discovered and rediscovered in many places over many spans of time.
Richard Carlson
They started their fermented drinks using feces and diseased phlegm? I'm not mourning the demise of this particular "culture".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile the word "new" can obviously have "relative" meanings, perhaps what's even worse than any so-called "scientific illiteracy", is the sense of grandiosity and "entitlement" that it must take to so casually resort to rudeness & name-calling over a disagreement. Although I think the, um, "scientific" term for that is clinical Narcissism! ;-p
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe method used to initiate fermentation is fascinating, but of course these people had no idea about germs--or the mechanism of fermentation for that matter. In fact German biologist Theodore Schwann was ridiculed by leading authorities when he first proposed the idea that fermentation was the result of microbes consuming sugar and excreting alcohol and carbon dioxide in 1839. (Schwann's scientific career was ended after only 5 years.) These ancient people were simply following ritualistic practices that had been found to work through trial and error.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMing..., I intended no rudeness nor name-calling. I consider it a fact that the scientifically literate would have no problem understanding what was meant by the term "new" in the context in which it was used. I'm sorry that I couldn't find a more polite term in which to couch my comment. You, on the other hand, were deliberately rude and resorted to name-calling. You read way too much into a simple statement.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Ipias from Quito were a human cultural group whose believes were too much different to those of the Occidental Culture. When they died, they returned to mother earth, they didn`t go to heaven. In that context, they made deep tombs to facilitate the dead`s last trip to their original homeland. If we think on the introspective character of this believes (i.e. coming back to the bowels of the earth)it is not surprising that live in the form of food (i.e. chicha) came from their oun bowels, that is, from their feaces. On the other hand, the aparent absence of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in the fermentations systems in America (unpublished studies of fermented beverages from ancient indian cultures of America) can probably point out to an ecological characteristic very much different to that of the European, where wine and beer were produced thousands of years before, using the abovementioned species. Moreover, if we think on the tradicional, old fashioned way of making wine, we have to remind that grape juice was obtained after steping with naked feet on the grapes. I need to remark that Candida yeast species are also found as inhabitants in feet, in some cases causing athlete`s foot disease.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs for the pejorative comment about the culture that some reader posted, I would ask for the wide and profound criteria about the costumes of our and his ancestors.