What strategy could a brewer use to favor genetic drift over natural selection in their Kombucha culture?

The strategy of frequently restarting the culture from small samples effectively promotes genetic drift because it diminishes the effective population size. When a culture is restarted with small samples, the genetic diversity within the population is reduced, which allows random fluctuations in allele frequencies to have a more significant impact. This small initial population can lead to increased chances of certain traits becoming fixed or lost purely due to chance rather than selective pressures from the environment, which is the hallmark of genetic drift.

In contrast, when a culture is maintained under large populations or kept under constant conditions, the effects of natural selection become more pronounced. Larger population sizes tend to stabilize allele frequencies due to the buffering effects of genetic variation, allowing advantageous traits to be selected for over time. Thus, by consistently using small cultural samples, the brewer can manipulate the population dynamics in favor of genetic drift, leading to changes in the culture through random processes rather than through environmental selection pressures.