BioBeer: At the very yeast, it fights cancer

By Cindy Dinh     10/30/08 7:00pm

Guzzling beer may soon be as healthy sipping as a glass of red wine. A team of six undergraduates in Assistant Professor of Bioengineering Jonathan Silberg's biochemistry and bioengineering lab is working on extracting the antioxidant resveratrol found in red wine and splicing it into beer. This genetically engineered concoction will boast the same cancer-fighting, age-defying benefits naturally found in grapes."Resveratrol has a myriad of health benefits like improved cardiovascular function, increased insulin sensitivity for Type II diabetics, and [it] inhibits several proteins known to contribute to cancer," Sid Richardson College junior Taylor Stevenson, who is working on the project, said.

Since May, the team has worked to genetically engineer yeast cells to produce resveratrol in beer. They have coined the new beer BioBeer.

"I have been planning on doing this at home for awhile, home brewing," Peter Nguyen, a biochemistry graduate student and adviser to the team, said. "A lot of the undergrads took it upon themselves to do research, and they took the project out of my hands."

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Baker College junior David Ouyang, a member of the research team, said the project is unique because of its degree of undergraduate participation. The undergraduate members of the team are involved in stages of the project's design, suggestion and implementation, Ouyang said.

The team will pitch their BioBeer idea next Friday and Saturday at the Internally Genetically Engineered Machine competition held annually at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is the third year Rice has competed in the prestigious biology competition.

"We're at this halfway mark in our project," Stevenson said. "We're going to have preliminary data to show, but to complete this full project we need to add another component to our genetic circuit or another step in the metabolic pathway."

It takes about 10 days to make beer, but the team will be presenting partially fermented beer at the competition, he said.

"The amount of feedback we got back on the theory of it is amazing," Stevenson said. "If we can deliver a working project fairly soon, it's going to be big."

Though other laboratories have already produced resveratrol in yeast, no one has put the compound in beer yet, Nguyen said.

"Some people have made resveratrol to purify it out as a supplement," Nguyen said. "You can engineer yeast to make it and extract the resveratrol. But if you make it in beer, resveratrol is made while the product is made, which no one has done before."

Nguyen said resveratrol in beer is essentially a free health benefit since it is in a ready-to-consume format and does not need to be extracted.

"Ultimately, the point of the project is that it will be so cheap to put reserveratol in beer," Jones College junior Thomas Segall-Shapiro said. "I want to see it like iodized salt, as a free health benefit. Resveratol in beer should be the new standard."

Unlike the regular yeast strains found in kitchens and laboratory experiments, actual brewing yeast is used in the experiment. The team discussed their idea with alumnus Brock Wagner (Lovett '87), owner of Saint Arnold's Brewery, who provided them actual yeast strains used in his brewery, from Hefewiezen beer, an unfiltered beer.

To reap the full health benefits, people will have to drink all the yeast cells in unfiltered beer, Segall-Shapiro said.

"With BioBeer, beer bellies will be the yeast of your worries," Ouyang said.

Five of the six undergrads who are engineering BioBeer are under 21.

"We're not making alcoholic beverages," Stevenson said. "It's a fermentation experiment."

Since the first batch of beer will have residual antibiotics potentially harmful to humans, the beer will not be featured at Willy's Pub or Valhalla, Stevenson said.

"If we were trying to market this, I can imagine the amount of red tape to get the genetically modified yeast to be fit for human consumption," Stevenson said.

As a long-term project, the team plans to finish the iGEM competition, add some more components to finalize BioBeer and begin writing for publication immediately. All the undergraduates, graduate students and faculty will be co-authors of the paper.

"As a grad student, all I care about is getting it published," Nguyen said. "This project has gotten a lot of publicity for Rice and there's a potential to have it patented."

"This is the most fun I've had in science for a long time," Martel College sophomore Selim Sheikh said.

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