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From breakfast toast to evening wine, yeast is the microscopic thing that we cannot live without. We knew what yeast did as an invisible brewer and baker long before we had a clue about the existence of microorganisms. Ten thousand years ago, our ancestors abandoned bush meat and wild fruit in favor of farming animals and cultivating grain. Leaving the forests and grasslands, our desire for beer and wine produced by the fungus was a major stimulus for agricultural settlement. It takes a village to run a brewery or tend a vineyard. We domesticated wild yeast and yeast domesticated us. With the inevitable escape of the fungus from beer vats into bread dough, our marriage with yeast was secured by an appetite for fresh loaves of leavened bread.
Over the millennia, we have adapted the technologies of brewing, winemaking, and baking and have come to rely on yeast more and more. Yeast produces corn ethanol and other biofuels and has become the genetically-modified darling of the pharmaceutical business as a source of human insulin and a range of life-saving medicines. These practical uses of yeast have been made possible by advances in our understanding of its biology, and the power of genetic engineering has been used to modify the fungus to do just about anything we wish. We know more about yeast than any other organism built from complex cells like our own. To understand yeast is to understand life. In this book Nicholas P. Money offers a celebration of our favorite microorganism.
List of contents
- 1: Introduction: Yeasty Basics
- 2: Yeast of Eden: Drink
- 3: The Dough Also Rises: Bread
- 4: Frankenyeast: Cells
- 5: The Little Yeast on the Prarie: Biotechnology
- 6: Yeasts of the Wild: Yeast Diversity
- 7: Yeasts of Wrath: Health and Disease
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Nicholas P. Money is Professor of Botany and Western Program Director at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is an expert on fungal growth and reproduction. Nicholas has authored a number of popular science books that celebrate the diversity of the fungi and other microorganisms including
Mr. Bloomfield's Orchard: The Mysterious World of Mushrooms, Molds, and Mycologists (OUP, 2002), and
The Amoeba in the Room: Lives of the Microbes (OUP, 2014).
Summary
Yeast is humankind's favourite microbe, our partner in brewing, baking, and winemaking. Nicholas P. Money tells the story of this 10,000-year-long marriage, looking at how yeast served as a major factor in the development of civilization, celebrating its importance, and considering its future roles in molecular biology and genetic engineering.
Additional text
Yeast rises our bread, ferments our beer, wine, and spirits, perfumes our fruit, nourishes our bodies, makes us bold in love, foments chaos, powers our cars, and unlocks the soul. We humans tend to think that we rule the earth, but the evidence on our behalf is scant. This fascinating book unlocks the mysteries of our world's true masters, which were here before we walked, will be here when we're gone, and, in the meantime, help make our time on the planet a lot more fun and infinitely more delicious.
Report
A highly entertaining read ... a fascinating and lucid historical study, rich with biological intrigue. Timothy James, Current Biology
