Sorry for the terrible pun, but l’m legit curious.
A friend and I were talking about how some sourdough mothers, pho broths, etc can literally be human generations old. Is it a “Ship of Theseus” kind of thing? Does the process of maintaining the mother prevent this by adding in new yeast? Do the many generations of yeast make different strains of yeast? Is there a concern that the many yeast generations could create undesirable modifications?
In: Biology
Most yeast cells reproduce asexually via mitosis. So the yeast cells are biologically identical to each other, meaning it should be the same even over human generation type spans. Obviously mutations can and will occur over that time, but functionally speaking you can safely assume a sourdough starter across multiple generations is the same starter the whole time.
There are some yeast cells that can form multicellular organisms with itself, but I don’t know if those would be the type of yeast cells used in starters and then passed down, like the context of your question. But regardless, that subset of yeast cells might have more room for variation and changing gradually over time, but I’m not an expert and I don’t want to speculate too much.
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