Text 4641, 80 rader
Skriven 2008-03-30 15:50:02 av BURTON FORD (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av MICHAEL LOO
Ärende: NASA Wine Sniffer
=========================
Hi Michael                  3/30/08 3:45 PM

Thought you might be interested in this.   Note the final paragraph.

"NASA's Wine Sniffer   March 25, 2008  by Henry Bortman
Special from Astrobiology Magazine"

"I admit I never actually wrote this goal into my grant," University of
California, Berkeley Professor of Chemistry Richard Mathies told me, as one
of his graduate students injected a drop of Zinfandel into Mathies's
organic analyzer. "But it is an important demonstration" that the detector
actually works.

The device in Mathies's lab is a prototype of the Mars Organic Analyzer
(MOA). Along with several other components, MOA has been selected by NASA
to be part of the Urey instrument that will fly aboard ESA's ExoMars rover,
scheduled for launch in 2013. Urey will be the most sophisticated
life-detection instrument ever sent to Mars, and will be capable of
answering questions about life on Mars that were left unanswered by NASA's
Viking landers more than 30 years ago.
----------- Warning! Editing being done here -------

Here's how the wine comes into play. A few years ago, Mathies began
noticing that when he had a glass or two of red wine at dinner, he'd wake
up suddenly, like clockwork, at 2:30 in the morning, hot, flushed, and with
an elevated heart rate and blood pressure. "It was a classic
adrenaline-release, hypertensive response," he said. For a while, he simply
stopped drinking wine.

Some time later he mentioned the effect to a colleague, a former
neurobiologist, who said, "I know what your problem is. It's tyramine."
Tyramine is a modified amino acid made within the human body, and it
triggers a set of chemical reactions that ultimately cause the body to
produce adrenaline. It's common in foods that are made through bacterial
fermentation, such as wine, cheese and aged meats. Wouldn't it be nice, he
thought, if there were some way to figure out more precisely which foods
had tyramine in them, so he could stay away from them.

Then he realized he did have a way, that he'd "been working for ten years
on a machine that is the most sensitive detector for organic amines you
could ever imagine." He contacted winemaker Kent Rosenblum, the proprietor
of Rosenblum Cellars, headquartered nearby in Alameda, Calif., and proposed
a collaboration. Using Rosenblum's 2006 pressing, he "sampled all the way
through the fermentation process, to figure out when the tyramine is made,"
and discovered that it occurs not during primary fermentation, which is
driven by yeast, but rather during a secondary fermentation process, known
as malolactic fermentation, common in the production of red wine.
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"Merlots seem to be particularly high," Mathies says, "but at this point we
haven't done a sufficiently conclusive study" to figure out whether some
varietals, or wines from specific wineries, are consistently
more-tyramine-laden than others.

Long-term, Mathies hopes to see a miniaturized version of the MOA technology
developed for "point-of-consumption" use. Many people have extreme
sensitivities to certain foods, and can suffer severe hypertensive crises,
strokes, or even death from consuming something that is, to them, toxic.
Mathies envisions a handheld PDA-like detector that a patron could use, for
example, in a restaurant, to test a suspect food before eating or drinking it.
Similar technology could also be used by food processors to detect harmful
bacterial contamination.

Next on Mathies' agenda, however, is an ultra-clean-room test of the
tabletop version of the analyzer. "The idea is to get the sensitivity to
the point where the smallest quantum unit of life as we know it could be
detected. The smallest living quantum unit of life is a bacterial cell."
Bacterial contamination is so pervasive on Earth that it's impossible to
test this level of sensitivity without creating a special clean-room
environment. "Just the handling of the solutions contaminates them so much
from infall that you can't get a decent measurement," he says.

In the mean time, if you happen across a bottle of 2006 Rosenblum
Zinfandel, you might want to check it out. It's not every day you get to
drink a glass of wine that played a part in the search for life."


Bur
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