Blogs / Discoblog

Have you ever tasted spoiled beer? Twenty-six-year-old Monique Haakensen once did. A few years ago, when the Canadian woman watched her brothers attempt to brew their own beer, the end result smelled like cheese and tasted awful.

To figure out what caused the beer to go bad, Haakensen, a University of Saskatchewan graduate student, bottled the beer and brought it into the lab. Using a technique called polymerase chain reaction, she was able to discover two new genes (hitA and horC) that hastened the growth of bacteria in beer.

Normally, bacteria don’t grow in beer, but when there’s a resistance-associated gene in the brew, certain strains can thrive. The most common bacteria that causes beer spoilage is lactic acid bacteria (LAB). Haakensen looked to see how LAB’s isolates, Lactobacillus and Pediococcus, grew in beer. By using this new form of DNA testing, Haakensen can now tell breweries how quickly their beer will go bad by checking for the presence of either hitA or horC.

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Attention criminals: You might want to consider changing your last name to Smith, the most common—and least traceable—last name in both Britain and the U.S. Why? Because men may be carrying a name tag in their genes.

The Y chromosome is passed from father to son with little variation, and in many cultures, so are last names. Researchers at Leicester University in the U.K. seized on this coincidence to study the genetic linkages among British surnames. She found that men who share the same last name, especially the less common ones, are likely to share a common ancestor. This means your Googlegänger is probably a long lost relative after all.

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