It's possible I missed it, but I didn't see where it said how they came up with this strain of yeast. I was kind of assuming they used CRISPR or some other kind of gene editing to make it.

Regardless of if it was edited or selective breeding and random mutation, I do share those same concerns about how fast it might mutate and lose its effectiveness.

As far as it mutating into something harmful, sure it's a possibility, but the same possibility technically exists with any strain of yeast out there in the world, untold millions of generations of yeast have lived, mutated, reproduced, and died in breweries, bakeries, and vineyards since humans first started brewing beer and baking bread, and it hasn't gone horribly wrong yet. It's certainly worth being cautious about, and I'm certainly no geneticist to make an educated statement about it, but I suspect it's probably a pretty low likelihood.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago

The reason why I thought about harmful mutations in this context is because this strain of yeast has some kind of property that activates the immune system, otherwise the whole concept wouldn't work.

That's not something regular yeast does, so for regular yeast to evolve something like that, that's a major step in evolution that doesn't happen quickly.

But modifying the immune system activating payload is much less difficult.

Due to the Hoskins effect, it's possible that an immune system trained for a "somewhat wrong" pathogen can perform worse than one that hasn't seen that kind of pathogen at all before. So if the payload of the yeast mutates, it can "mistrain" the immune system so that it then performs worse on the real-life pathogen.