A new paper is out from my lab. This one is a remarkable story of work by PhD Student Marina E. De León (https://phylogenomics.me/people/marina-de-leon/).
It started with her pouring out some soy milk from her fridge that was blue.
See her Tweet about this here: https://twitter.com/MicrobialFuture/status/1220399781165461504?s=20https://twitter.com/MicrobialFuture/status/1220399781165461504?s=20
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsThere’s something about #soy that blue/violet pigmented #bacteria love! I’m gonna have to isolate this sapphire gem and find out what’s going on. @phylogenomics my 6th PHD project? pic.twitter.com/XfSeYfs1WW
— Marina De León (@MicrobialFuture) January 23, 2020
And then she isolated bacteria from the soy milk and from some blue tofu in her fridge, identified them, did experiments to see if these isolated bacteria could cause soy milk to turn blue, found some that did, sequenced their genomes, and analyzed them to show that these ones had similar properties to other bacteria known to cause blue discoloration of food products. A truly remarkable piece of work.
See the paper here: “Draft Genome Sequences and Genomic Analysis for Pigment Production in Bacteria Isolated from Blue Discolored Soymilk and Tofu“
And thanks to Guillaume Jospin and Harriet Wilson who helped with the work and all the people in my lab and via social media that encouraged and supported Marina along the way.
And see also:
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsRemember that glass of blue soymilk? We published an entire #OpenAcess genome paper based on bacteria isolated from that milk! This is a purely pandemic paper and is #CitizenScience and #SciComm at it's greatest! Thanks to @phylogenomics & @Guillaumejospin https://t.co/dN3Ybnchx2
— Marina De León (@MicrobialFuture) October 2, 2021
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Jonathan Eisen's Lab 
I bought some organic vanilla favored soy milk. I had two glasses of it, after 4 days from opening it , it poured out dark blue green was thick and curdled. It had been refrigerated and was not expired.
Does anyone know what causes this, should I be concerned that I had two glasses of this soymilk before it turned dark blue green.
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Hi Brittnee,
What an exciting discovery. It sounds like your soymilk may have been contaminated with a bacterium called Pseudomonas carnis, just like the one we isolated from our soymilk in the publication. This bacterium causes foods and animal carcasses to become blue in coloration, but is not known to be pathogenic (disease causing) to humans, so I hope you’re feeling okay. Out of curiosity, was this Silk brand soymilk? Thanks for sharing!
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Hi Brittnee! It’s such an unbelievable sight to see, right? We isolated a bacterium called Pseudomonas carnis from our blue soymilk, and we’re still trying to figure out what this blue color/pigment really is! Fortunately, P. Carnis isn’t known to be pathogenic (disease causing) to humans, so hopefully you’re physically feeling okay. Out of curiosity, was your soymilk SILK brand? Thanks for leaving a comment with your discovery, it’s always good to see when/where similar phenomena are happening.
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