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A brewer in 1963 received a letter from his main office stating that the last batch of beer he made didn't have enough alcohol. Confused, he realized nothing had changed in his brewing process. Worried about losing his job, he enlisted two microbiologists who discovered a contaminant in the yeast he was using. They called it killer yeast because it poisons its environment while creating an antidote for itself. Killer yeast can spread rapidly through populations, and it has been found all over the world, even in unexpected places like Antarctica. It can be found in various foods and environments. In 1963, a brewer received a letter from his main office, saying the whole of the last batch of beer he made didn't have enough alcohol in it. He was confused. Nothing had changed in the way he'd made this last batch. Same amount of time in the fermenter, same amount of barley. He was stressing out. If he didn't resolve this soon, the next letter he would get from main office would be one signing his termination. He decided he needed to understand what was going on inside his fermenter, and so he decided to get the best minds on the job. Enter two big-time microbiologists, Devin and Makawa. They took a sample of the yeast the brewer was using to turn starches into alcohol, and they discovered a contaminant. The contaminant in question looked incredibly like brewer's yeast, but when our scientists put the contaminant next to the brewer's yeast, they started dying. This was the discovery of killer yeast, a never-recorded type of yeast which poisoned its environment while simultaneously synthesizing an antidote for itself. Killers have recipes for both antidote and toxin coded in their genome. This allows them to pass these recipes on to their offspring, allowing killers to spread through populations like wildfire. We've been finding killer yeast all over the world ever since. Killers have been able to colonize all seven continents, even Antarctica. They are proper foodies, being found in dairy products, on the surface of fruits, in orange juice pickles, and even sausages. But they're not fussy, and they'll also make do in ocean sediments and forest soils.