One day, you might be able to enjoy a boozy night out without painful consequences the next day. (Well, other than all those drunken bad decisions.) Scientists have developed a new type of wine that will leave you hangover-free.
Researchers at the University of Illinois have engineered a type of yeast that is "jailbreaking," meaning they can alter genetic material and change how yeast reproduces. That opens up a ton of possibilities, since scientists can tinker with different genetic material to make wine and beer have different properties, including taste.
"Say we have a yeast that produces a wine with great flavor and we want to know why," lead researcher Yong-Su Jin said in a press release. "We delete one gene, then another, until the distinctive flavor is gone, and we know we've isolated the gene responsible for that characteristic." The results were published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
But the greatest application of this new research? Ending the hangover as we know it. If scientists engineer the yeast in a certain way, they can create an enzyme to help a process called maloactic fermentation, a process that makes wine smooth. When maloactic fermentation doesn't go as planned, it creates byproducts that leave you with a bad headache the next day.
This new type of yeast could even make food and drinks healthier. The researchers also said they can engineer the yeast to boost levels of resveratrol, a healthy ingeredient in wines, and could even add good-for-you elements to fermented foods like cheese and pickles. Isn't science a wonderful thing?