Wine Without Hangover? Scientists Develop Hangover-Free Drink

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There's nothing worse than having a morning hangover from drinking your favorite wine. But according to a research from the scientists of the University of Illinois, the morning after effects of drinking wine might be reduced, reports LA Times.

The report published online on EurekAlert says genetically modified yeast will not only reduce the toxic byproducts that causes hangover from drinking too much wine, but will also increase its health benefits. It may also be possible to increase the nutritional value of other foods by adding ginseng and other beneficial compounds to the wine yeast, according to the data they have collected from the research.

"Fermented foods--such as beer, wine, and bread--are made with polyploid strains of yeast, which means they contain multiple copies of genes in the genome. Until now, it's been very difficult to do genetic engineering in polyploid strains because if you altered a gene in one copy of the genome, an unaltered copy would correct the one that had been changed," Yong-Su Jin stated, an associate professor of microbial genomics at the University of Illinois.

Jin and the team found a way to precisely extract a polypoid strain called Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a component widely used to ferment wine and beer.

"Wine, for instance, contains the healthful component resveratrol," Jin said in a statement. "With engineered yeast, we could increase the amount of resveratrol in a variety of wine by 10 times or more."

"Scientists need to create designed mutations to determine the function of specific genes," Jin added. In order to get to this conclusion, he explains that they isolate a gene until they know which gene is responsible in creating a certain characteristic.

But according to the article by Shape, the genetically-modified wine may not be available to the public until the next few years. There is also a chance that it won't completely get rid of the headache because not all hangovers are caused by the histamines from the amine compounds of the yeast in the beverage.

The abstract for the research, "Construction of a Quadruple Auxotophic Mutant of an Industrial Polypoid Saccharomyces cerevisiae Strain by Using RNA-Guided Cas9 Nuclease" was published online in Applied and Environment Microbiology. Jamie H. D. Cate of the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Yong Su-Jin, Guochang Zhang, In Iok Kong, Jinjing Liu and Heejin Kim from the University of Illinois and Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at Urbana Champaign and funded by the Energy Biosciences Institute.