Beers on tap at the Samuel Adams Tap Room in Boston

Scientists at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms are referencing heavy metal and beer in a new study.

An analysis by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers finds that yeast, an abundant waste product from breweries, can filter out even trace amounts of lead.

Lead is highly toxic, even at tiny concentrations. You may be familiar with the Flint water crisis in Michigan, where the city’s water source was switched from a lake to a river and lead leached from aging pipes.

MIT researchers mention Flint in a journal article on the yeast findings, published in Nature Communications Earth and Environment.

The solution studied by the MIT team, called biosorption, has been known for decades, according to a news release.

But the process has only been examined at higher concentrations, in the one part-per-million level. MIT says its research shows the approach can make a dent down to part-per-billion levels of contamination.

The standard for allowable lead is 5 parts per billion in the European Union, while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says no level of lead in water supplies is safe.

In this image, a control group of yeast cells (top row) is compared to yeast cells after they have ... [+] accumulated lead from contaminated water (bottom row).

Biosorption uses inactive biological material to remove heavy metals from water. The MIT team reportedly “demonstrated that a single gram of the inactive, dried yeast cells can remove up to 12 milligrams of lead in aqueous solutions with initial lead concentrations below 1 part per million.” In five minutes.

A look at the demonstration, using a single gram of inactive, dried yeast cells to remove up to 12 ... [+] milligrams of lead in less than five minutes.

Unfortunately, this beer miracle can’t be launched immediately to help clean up more than 12,000 miles of U.S. waterways contaminated by acid mine drainage, for example.

A system would need to be designed to process the water and retrieve the yeast, embedding the yeast cells in a kind of filter. MIT is working on it.

Besides lead, the method also can be used to remove heavy metals like cadmium and copper.

“Overall, this work showcases the use of an effective trace heavy metal removal biomaterial, made from an environmentally friendly, inexpensive, benign to human health, and easy-to-mass-produce microorganism,” the journal article states.