[LINK].

BeerDeCoded, was initiated in the context of Hackuarium, a Swiss not-for-profit organisation that supports unconventional research ideas and promotes the public understanding of science. Members of the community are interested in participatory biology and want to promote interdisciplinary citizen research and innovation outside traditional institutions, using low-cost, simple and accessible technologies. The goal of the BeerDeCoded project is to extend the scientific knowledge about beer, while d the public with issues related to personal genomics, food technology, and their role in society. With the release of this first data set, we built the proof of concept for a beer targeted metagenome analysis pipeline that can be used in high schools, citizen science laboratories, craft breweries or industrial plants.

Over the month of June 2015, a total of 124 individuals contributed over 10,000 Euros to a crowdfunding campaign that provided funding for the first stage of the BeerDeCoded project. Reaching out to the public through this campaign also enabled crowdsourcing for the collection of 120 beer samples from 20 countries. We have subsequently demonstrated that it is possible to extract DNA directly from bottled beer using low cost methodologies, typically available to citizen scientists (see Methods). After amplification and quality control, 39 samples were sent for DNA sequencing. Among these 39 beers we had 30 beers from Switzerland, 5 beers from Belgium, 2 beers from Italy, 1 from france and 1 from austria.