 Hi, my name is John Morrissey. I'm from University College Cork in Ireland, and I'm Editor-in-Chief of Femmes Yeast Research. So first of all, let's start with the session that already took place, the session about yeast, right? That's right, you know, it was a great session. I think the measure of a good session is the amount of questions, and my problem as chair was actually stopping questions, so that was really good. And the focus of the session was on beneficial role of yeast in production of fermented foods and flavours. I mean, there are a few different themes that came out in the course of the talk. One was yeast diversity, because just quite a few different yeast species, which we now find have roles in fermented products. You know, traditionally we'd think of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and beer and wine and so forth, but in fact, we were more focused, I would say, on cheeses and some yeast that are associated with cheese ripening and contributing to cheese flavours. Some interesting yeast like the Debaromyces hensini, which some people consider a spoilage yeast, but in fact also has some very interesting properties in controlling spoilage organisms. So we talked about that. We had a couple of talks that looked at how yeast metabolites can contribute to flavour, and this is a really interesting trend in the whole food sector, because there's interest in alternative foods, replacement for some traditional sources of foods, especially coming from dairy or meat, and yeast can contribute quite a lot of flavours, which are similar to, let's say, meat flavours or Yunami flavours, and so some of the talks focused on that. So we had kind of a diversity of talks around those themes. And currently, how would you say it's yeast usage in products? There are some traditional, I call it a yeast product, like Marmite, which was mentioned in the session, which is literally pure yeast, but yeast extract is quite commonly used in the food sector, partly because it can contribute a meaty flavour as a food ingredient. So at the moment, I would say as a commodity product yeast is used in the food sector, but where the interest lies is really maybe moving up the value chain and using specialised yeast or yeast that have been improved for certain applications to actually make higher value products that will be used in diverse foods, I would say. Is it more looking like we add yeast into the food themselves, or do we use yeast to produce some minerals or whatever, and we use those as additives to the food? Yeah, I think we're seeing both directions actually, because one of the interesting directions is to use yeast themselves and their fermentative activity in products, and so the interesting metabolites and flavours would be produced as the normal course of activity of the yeast along with their function. That's one part. But I would say that the alternative, which is essentially growing yeast cultures and either purifying a product from yeast culture or maybe extracting something from yeast or even using dried or laced yeast as an ingredient, that's the other growth. So both are actually happening. So this afternoon, you're going to give your own personal talk and it's going to be titled Domestication of Yeast in Nature and for Biotechnology. So what will that be about? Okay, well, I don't want to give all of it away now because then you won't come to it, but one of the key trends that we've seen in recent years in the yeast area related to food is the realisation that yeasts have been associated with human activity and fermentation for a long time, for thousands of years. And what we see is that for a lot of fermented foods where yeasts are associated with them, and I'm thinking beverages and dairy products, but also things like soy sauce and miso, that strains appear to have been selected or have co-evolved along with the human activity of making the process or making the food. And we're seeing increasing evidence for what we might call domestication. Now that's kind of a loaded term, but basically we think that we have selected yeast strains to carry out certain functions and those strains are different from the wild relatives. So I'm going to be talking a little bit about that and I'm going to be talking, I'm going to be giving you a couple of very specific examples from my own research where we've worked on cluveromyces and we've shown how cluveromyces marxianus has been domesticated for lactose fermentation, so making cheeses and kefir and products like that. And we're going to show how some of those genes transferred to another cluveromyces species, that's called calactus. And so I will be kind of making a point that over the course of evolution, transfer of genes between organisms and between yeasts is quite common. So I'll be talking about the domestication in that sense, but then I'll be talking about how we can use that information and if we want to design and build strains for new applications, how can we take the knowledge of what nature has done in domestication already? How can we integrate that with synthetic biology tools? How can we sort of mimic the selective and continuous cultivation processes that people have, that people inadvertently maybe without knowing they were domesticating organisms used and can we accelerate now the production of new strains for interesting applications? For economic benefit and for societal benefit. Yeah, and in your experience, where was the craziest place you would have found yeasts? Naturally. Well, I'm going to tell you the craziest place because I was telling somebody else earlier, there's a paper actually came out in a journal about a month ago where they didn't isolate the yeast itself, but they isolated Saccharomyces cereusiae DNA and you wouldn't guess this one, the source was fossilized feces, fossilized human feces from the iron age. And in fact, in that particular study that this was in the Hallstattas salt mines in Austria, they did a metagenome analysis, metagenome analysis of all the DNA, they identified not only Saccharomyces cereusiae, but also Penicillium rock 40, that's a fungus I'll mention as well this afternoon. And one conclusion from that study is that the living was very good back in the iron age because people were eating rock for cheese and drinking beer. So while the yeast wasn't isolated, the yeast was there. So that's an unexpected example, I think. Of course. And now let's move into your involvement with the Femmes Journal, Femmes Gease Research. So you are the editor-in-chief there. And I know there's a few words that you would like to say for all of the audience that is watching. One thing I would say is Femmes Gease Research, it's one of the journals of Femmes, which is a learned society that's representing a lot of different microbiology societies around Europe. And publishing is a very important thing that scientific societies do because it gives authors a chance to publish their work. We take, I suppose we take the values of scientific publishing very seriously. So the quality of publications coming from Femmes journals is very high in terms of the peer review process, the quality of our editorial boards. So when you publish a paper in a society journal, Femmes Journal, including yeast research, I mean you are guaranteed a high quality evaluation process and you know that the papers you can read are trustworthy. And I think that's a very important thing in an era when there are many, many papers being published. The other point I would make is, there's a lot of competition for papers. People get emails all the time soliciting papers, lots of big commercial publishing houses. And while there's not necessarily anything wrong with that per se, the income that scientific societies make from their journals goes back into the community. So Femmes sponsors meeting grants, post-surprises at conferences, travel grants for young researchers. So the money goes back. So I would say that I would really encourage authors to look at society journals. And if you're working in the yeast area, I would say Femmes yeast research is the society journal for yeast. So I would encourage people to submit their papers to the journal. And are there any specific calls right now? Sure, yeah. So I mean Femmes yeast research is a broad scope journal. So we would accept papers on almost any aspect of yeast research once it sort of advances the knowledge of yeast. While we have that broad open call in for papers anytime, we do have two specialized calls out of the moment. One of them is for a special issue that's going to be on yeast physiology and metabolism. And the reason that we chose that topic right now, in fact, it's a memorial issue in memory of a scientist called Lex Schiffers who passed away during the year who was the first editor-in-chief of Femmes yeast research. But also he was a seminal figure in sort of revitalizing yeast research in the last, this was in the last 40 years of the last century because he really put a strong emphasis on understanding physiology and quantitative work. And a lot of the work that he did was kind of foundational for the later development of the whole by ethanol sector. So we're very interested in getting more papers from people working on any aspect of yeast physiology, metabolism, any yeast, any yeast species. And we will collate all those papers together and we will launch a thematic issue of the accepted papers next July. And that's going to be launched to coincide with a yeast conference, ISSY 36, Suntasy, which is going to be held in Vancouver in Canada. And so for papers that are in that thematic issue, they'll get extra promotion and publicity and so forth. And then we have a second special issue called for papers at the moment on yeast lipids. And that covers two aspects because lipids are obviously really important for the fundamental biology of yeast for making membranes and the signal molecules and all sorts of things. That's one side and the other side is that there's a lot of interest in yeast products. In fact, the keynote talk this morning from Professor Jens Nielsen talked about producing designer fatty acids that can be used, for example, to give enhanced texture and flavor to alternative meats. So there's a lot of interest in making different kinds of lipids for different applications. And so again, there's a very interesting yeast conference, yeast lipid conference on in Gothenburg next June, YLC 2022. And we will have this thematic issue to launch at that conference. So again, anybody who's doing research on any aspect of yeast lipids in any yeast organism, you know, we would welcome you to submit your paper and it will be reviewed in a normal way. And then hopefully we'll have a nice collection of papers that we launched together. All papers will be published on a rolling basis, but we will sort of launch the TI and publicize them in June. That was the last question I have for you today. Thanks so much for your time and good luck in your presentation. Thank you very much, been a pleasure chatting.