I am also thrilled that our work has inspired the amazing team at Jasper Hill Farm to make new cheeses (bloomy rind cheese in top of the photo) with their locally-adapted Penicillium solitum isolates. This is different from the French strains of Penicillium camemberti that are typically used.

There is a lot in the paper, and too much to unpack here (read it!). But my favorite part of the story is that transposable elements that insert just upstream of alb1 are likely causing a lot of the green --> white phenotypic shifts.

And so began the highly creative and integrative PhD project by @nicolasleonlouw.bsky.social to understand if/how Penicillium solitum was evolving in this cheese cave. The frozen samples from 2016 from the wedding proposal trip were an essential microbial time capsule for this work.

We used images from social media and other sources to piece together a timeline of the Bayley Hazen Blue green-to-white transition from ~2014 to 2024.

At the same time, we had been noticing (with lots of help from the amazing team of cheesemakers and affineurs!) that in the Jasper Hill cheese caves, the rinds of Bayley Hazen Blue were turning white!

In some cases when you passaged the green Penicillium solitum on cheese curd agar in the lab, it would change from green to white over very short periods of time.

Rachel said YES to Charlie's marriage proposal. And we collected a bunch of samples from the rinds of Bayley Hazen Blue cheese. At the time, the rinds of the cheese were bright green. I put the 2016 green rind samples in the -80 freezer and never tossed them out...

We had fun thinking about the future of fermented foods in this review for @currentbiology.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Sent out some trainee love on our Slack today. This is a tough time of the year for many for a lot of reasons. Check in on your people and be kind to yourself and others. Grateful for the many folks who have checked in on me in the past. ❤️

Excited to share our review in Annual Review of Microbiology on microbiome assembly in fermented foods. We tried to write an accessible review of the mechanisms/processes that shape microbial communities across a range of ferments. Enjoy! www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10....

Going to need a bigger rain gauge if we keep having rain like we did this summer. This all fell last night in ~ 2 hours. Hoping everyone in Central MA stays safe and dries out soon. (Sorry for inches… I ❤️ metric system!).

Step one in making cheese curd agar.