The whole IP situation with yeast is mess - in some cases you have European breweries who have sold beer to wholesalers, who've sold to retailers in Europe, who have sold beer to unknow tourists from the US, who have taken bottles home and harvested yeast and passed it around their friends for free, who have passed it to the US yeast labs, who have made multi-$m businesses out of selling yeast to homebrewers in jurisdictions around the world and to multi-$100m's commercial breweries.
It's not really in anybody's interest to unravel that can of worms. Yes, genome sequencing can tell you a lot, but it's a lot more valuable if you can pin strains to particular breweries at particular times in history. Three years ago, we had to rely almost entirely on internet legend, whereas now we have a surfeit of DNA data and the history side is lacking in comparison. But you can resolve the two somewhat, by taking brewery strains (Tim Taylor, Fulller's etc) and doing DNA tests on their actual yeast, to see if it is closely related to homebrew strains that the internet thinks came from that brewery. That's a phase II which is starting to happen...
You also have the whole conflict between academia (where much of the public sequencing has happened) and commercial interests (even among the original breweries, some are very open with information and others are complete closed books).
Topic: Interesting Data from the yeast Genome Study (Read 16230 times)
