A night of alcoholic over-indulgence generally results in headache and intense nausea, but it could finally become a thing of the past soon.

Yong-Su Jin, a professor of microbial genomics at the University of Illinois, has found a way that could change the way yeast reproduces.

According to him, his team can increase the amount of nutritional components in the yeast, by altering its DNA, and at the same time can reduce the toxic byproducts that result into hangovers.

Jin said that the polyploid strains of yeast are used to made fermented foods such as beer, wine and bread are made, which means that they contain multiple copies of genes in the genome.

He mentioned that till now, the genetic engineering in polyploid strains had been very difficult to do because when you alter a gene in one copy of the genome, an unaltered copy would automatically correct the one that had been changed.

Jin explained that his team of researchers used an enzyme that was like a "genome knife", which could be used to slice through all the copies of a gene, and stopped the happening of automatic corrections.

In addition, he said that the genome knife could be also used to clone the enzyme that increases malolactic fermentation as "improper malolactic fermentation leads to the generation of the toxic byproducts that may cause hangover symptoms.

In the work, published in the Applied and Environmental Microbiology journal, Jin has claimed the possibilities that the genome knife produces are "staggering" and that there is a possibility that it could even show how individual wines get their unique flavors.

He stated, “Say we have yeast that produces a wine with great flavor and we want to know why. We delete one gene, then another, until the distinctive flavor is gone, and we know we've isolated the gene responsible for that characteristic”.

Further, he said that the knife could also be used for the introduction of nutritional compounds into foods such as beef, cheese, kimchee, pickles and any other food that is produced with the use of a yeast fermentation method.