As a card carrying practical microbiologist, I like making yogurt – cheap and easy to make and very good for your tummy (see here for more on yogurt and a recipe you can use). But I admit I’m not too adventurous: the most I do is try different cultures, flavors, or milks (latest was goat milk).
Furthermore, having spent a lot of time in the lab, I am just not ready to ingest bugs that have been modified through molecular biology, no matter how harmless the transformation – it’s just deeply ingrained in me from years in the lab.
That doesn’t hold back these adventurers. A while back, Meredith Patterson was working on making a yogurt bug that would detect malamine in the milk. Melamine was that nasty chemical Chinese milk producers were using to up their protein readings.
More recently, Cathal Garvey and Tuur Van Balen, two fellas who are not shy about being adventurous, revisit the topic. Of course, hacking yogurt bugs to produce helpful chemicals (Tuur suggests Prozac) would turn yogurt into an even better functional food.
From Cathal Garvey:
“There is a common conceit among we DIYbio enthusiasts, namely to suggest that one could opt to create “glow-in-the-dark yoghurt” using DIYbio-oriented techniques as a nigh trivial matter. Indeed, this conceit led to my recently being queried by twitter and email about the possibility; where are the guides and how-tos, if it is so trivial? While a conceit it may be to suggest that glow-in-the-dark yoghurt would be trivial, that’s not to say it’s at all out of reach to the dedicated biohacker. Here, I will lay out a suggested course of action based on the available literature.”
Check out his protocol for modifying S thermophilus.
Tuur on the other hand, went so far as to actually going to the parts registry, synthesizing some DNA, and transforming L delbruekii (link via Cathal, of course).
Check out the video for Tuur’s demo:
What kinds of things would you want in your yogurt? Would you eat GM bugs? What do you think of all this?
Image from fred_v
There is no evidence that Tuur actually did anything transgenic, there are no parts in the registry relating to prozac production… It was just hand wavy artist-talk.
That I got. The Prozac was just a potential (and I do think it would be a pathway not one gene, no?).
But I do think he did have a modified bug that he was using. Just couldn’t see which he did.
And it was good wavy artist-talk. Would you eat GM yogurt?
While I dont have much background in biology ( slowly changing) I definitely wouldn’t knowingly eat any GM product. It’s one of the reasons I avoid soy like the plague, we just don’t know enough about the consequences of making small changes in the genetic sequence and how they translate to the proteome and gene expression. I read an article not long ago about a long term safety study done on rats that were fed Roundup ready GMO corn. Disturbing puts it mildly.