A former NASA biologist just launched a kit to help everyday home brewers step up their beer game by making beverages that glow, because who needs those regular amber hues anymore?
Josiah Zayner left his job in synthetic biology to start his own company, The Odin, which has a goal of increasing the accessibility of science and technology research, as Gizmodo reports. Zayner and The Odin produce kits for interested parties to conduct their own experiments, of sorts, and this bioluminescent beer kit is no different.
The fluorescent yeast kit uses a gene from a jellyfish and retails for $199. It requires about 10 hours of work over the span of two days before a user can get down to brewing.
“There is no impact on the flavor of the beer with the GFP engineering kit,” Zayner tells Eater. “You can literally add the engineered yeast to honey and water (or mash or wort) and the yeast will ferment and fluoresce.”
“This kit demonstrates the power and simplicity of genetic engineering by adding plasmid DNA to the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae so that it turns a fluorescent green color,” the kit’s guide reads. When used in a batch of home brew, the fluorescent yeast will produce a beer that glows under a blacklight, much as tonic water does, albeit for different reasons (tonic water contains quinine, which produces a similar glow as engineered yeast).
The kit has come under some scrutiny from the FDA, but Zayner says The Odin is not trying to sell food-grade materials, and has done research to demonstrate that the kits are not toxic or allergenic. “Honestly, when I started working on this stuff I was just trying to create something cool and push genetic design into the mainstream consumer market,” he says. “We are trying to sell a kit that allows people to create a new type of yeast that they can then possibly use to ferment with. We are trying to create a whole new industry, a whole new way of life where people can use genetic design freely in their homes.”
Zayner’s kit puts beer in a category of other weird glowing foods, including some Floam-colored udon noodles made by a Japanese food scientist and glow-in-the-dark ice cream made at a pop-up ice cream shop in Australia using UV-reactive liquid coloring.
• Biohacker to Spur Genetic Engineering Revolution With Glowing Beer [Gizmodo]
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