How to Train Your Fungus

Domestication led to profound changes in human culture. During this period, humans used breeding strategies to select for desirable traits in crops and livestock. These practices led to genetic and phenotypic changes that are trackable through archaeological and genomic records. Bacteria, yeasts, and molds also experienced domestication during the agricultural revolution, but the effects of domestication on microbes are poorly understood in comparison to plants and animals. Bodinaku et al. used experimental evolution to track the phenotypic changes that occur when wild Penicillium molds specialize and adapt to the cheese environment (I. Bodinaku, J. Shaffer, A. B. Connors, J. L. Steenwyk, et al., mBio 10:e02445-19, 2019, https://mbio.asm.org/content/10/5/e02445-19.long). Amazingly, after only eight generations of growth in a laboratory cheese environment, mutants emerged whose traits resembled those of the Brie and Camembert cheese mold Penicillium camemberti. This study demonstrated that the early stages of microbial domestication can occur rapidly and suggested that experimental evolution may be a viable strategy to exploit the metabolic diversity of wild microbes for food fermentation.