Frozen Frogs, Yeast, Paleobotany. April 27, 2018, Part 2

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🗓️ 27 April 2018

⏱️ 46 minutes

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Summary

When winter comes, animals have several options for survival. They can leave their habitats entirely for warmer environments, search for a cozy cave, or even find insulation under a toasty snowbank. And if you’re a wood frog in chilly Ohio or Alaska, or the larvae of a certain wingless midge in Antarctica, you might also just stay put, and freeze solid until the sun returns. But to survive such extreme low temperatures, the bodies of these animals have made some special adaptations: sugars that act like antifreeze, and processes for keeping ice outside their cells to protect their tissues. Yeast helps your bread to rise and beer to brew, but did you know that there’s yeast in the guts of insects? Or that your body is covered—and filled—with yeast cells? In this segment, recorded live in Miami University’s Hall Auditorium in Oxford, Ohio, mycologist Nicholas Money helps Ira uncover the hidden world of the humble fungus. His new book “The Rise Of Yeast” details some of the ways that the ubiquitous microorganism has helped shape civilization, from baking to biotechnology. Paleontologists and anthropologists might look to the fossilized bones of early hominins to help fill in the evolutionary story of our species. But paleoecologists like Denise Su, curator and head of paleobotany and paleoecology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, are more interested in what type of environments these early human ancestors were living in millions of years ago.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato coming to you from Miami University's Hall Auditorium in Oxford, Ohio.
0:11.0	I think we can all agree that human civilization is pretty complicated.
0:16.0	There are different elements that made us the complex creatures we are today. Some might say fire. It
0:22.9	allowed early humans to set up camp or language helped us develop large groups. My next guest
0:29.5	says there's another driver of civilization, yeast. You heard me right. Yeast. The simple fungus that
0:36.5	you bake with.
0:37.6	He's here to unlock the mysteries of yeast and what it's done for us.
0:42.0	Nicholas Money is the author of the new book, The Rise of Yeast.
0:49.3	How the sugar fungus-shaped civilization.
0:51.9	He's also professor of botany at Miami University in Oxford. Welcome to
0:55.7	Science Friday. Thank you for having me. You're a mycologist, right? That's somebody who studies
1:01.0	mushrooms? Mushrooms and other fungi. That's right. What is yeast? Is a plant? Is an animal? What is it?
1:06.8	So there are about 1,500 different species of yeast, and these are single-celled fungi that reproduce by forming buds.
1:17.3	And so they're structurally simple examples of other fungi, things that produce mushrooms, much more complicated structurally.
1:26.6	But yeast is a surprisingly complicated thing in its own
1:30.8	right. One thing that's, I find interesting, culturally, is that mycologists like me that study
1:38.1	fungal biology don't tend to know much about yeast. And similarly, yeast biologists rarely refer to themselves as
1:46.0	mycologists. They would say that they're cell biologists that happen to use yeast as a model
1:51.4	system in their experiments. But they would rarely regard themselves as mycologist, people
1:56.6	interested in going out into the woods and finding mushrooms.
1:59.8	Yes, you guys are sort of separated. You study how mushrooms transport the spores, and we have
2:05.3	some video clips, and I want you to explain what's going on in this video clip here.
	...

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