  Since the incident nuclei in heavy-ion collisions do not carry strangeness,
the global net strangeness of the detected hadrons has to vanish. We show that
there is an intimate relation between strangeness neutrality and
baryon-strangeness correlations. In the context of heavy-ion collisions, the
former is a consequence of quark number conservation of the strong interactions
while the latter are sensitive probes of the character of QCD matter. We
investigate the sensitivity of baryon-strangeness correlations on the
freeze-out conditions of heavy-ion collisions by studying their dependence on
temperature, baryon- and strangeness chemical potential. The impact of
strangeness neutrality on the QCD equation of state at finite chemical
potentials will also be discussed. We model the low-energy sector of QCD by an
effective Polyakov loop enhanced quark-meson model with 2+1 dynamical quark
flavors and use the functional renormalization group to account for the
non-perturbative quantum fluctuations of hadrons.
