Chemical messages in 170-year-old champagne bottles from the Baltic Sea: Revealing tastes from the past.

Archaeochemistry as the application of the most recent analytical techniques to ancient samples now provides an unprecedented understanding of human culture throughout history. In this paper, we report on a multiplatform analytical investigation of 170-y-old champagne bottles found in a shipwreck at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, which provides insight into winemaking practices used at the time. Organic spectroscopy-based nontargeted metabolomics and metallomics give access to the detailed composition of these wines, revealing, for instance, unexpected chemical characteristics in terms of small ion, sugar, and acid contents as well as markers of barrel aging and Maillard reaction products. The distinct aroma composition of these ancient champagne samples, first revealed during tasting sessions, was later confirmed using state-of-the-art aroma analysis techniques. After 170 y of deep sea aging in close-to-perfect conditions, these sleeping champagne bottles awoke to tell us a chapter of the story of winemaking and to reveal their extraordinary archaeometabolome and elemental diversity in the form of chemical signatures related to each individual step of champagne production.

Fluorescence fingerprinting of bottled white wines can reveal memories related to sulfur dioxide treatments of the must.

For the first time, Excitation Emission Matrix (EEM) fluorescence spectroscopy was combined with parallel factor statistical analysis (PARAFAC) and applied to a set of 320 dry white wines of the Chardonnay grape variety. A four component PARAFAC model (C1, C2, C3 and C4) best explained the variability of fluorescence signatures of white wines. Subtle changes were observed in EEMs of white wines from two different vintages (2006 and 2007), where different concentrations of sulfur dioxide (0, 4, and 8 g·hL(-1)) were added to the grape must at pressing. PARAFAC results clearly indicated that sulfur dioxide added to the must subsequently influenced white wine chemistry into three distinct sulfur dioxide dose-dependent aging mechanisms. For both vintages, C1 and C2 were the dominant components affected by sulfur dioxide and likely reacting with phenolic compounds associated with some presumably proteinaceous material. Distinct component combinations revealed either SO2 dependent or vintage-dependent signatures, thus, showing the extent of the complex versatile significance underlying such fluorescence spectra, even after several years of bottle aging.

TAT-mediated transduction of NF-Ya peptide induces the ex vivo proliferation and engraftment potential of human hematopoietic progenitor cells.

Retroviral overexpression of NF-Ya, the regulatory subunit of the transcription factor NF-Y, activates the transcription of multiple genes implicated in hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) self-renewal and differentiation and directs HSCs toward self-renewal. We asked whether TAT-NF-Ya fusion protein could be used to transduce human CD34(+) cells as a safer, more regulated alternative approach to gene therapy. Here we show that externally added recombinant protein was able to enter the cell nucleus and activate HOXB4, a target gene of NF-Ya, using real-time polymerase chain reaction RNA and luciferase-based protein assays. After TAT-NF-Ya transduction, the proliferation of human CD34(+) cells in the presence of myeloid cytokines was increased 4-fold. Moreover, TAT-NF-Ya-treated human primary bone marrow cells showed a 4-fold increase in the percentage of huCD45(+) cells recovered from the bone marrow of sublethally irradiated, transplanted NOD-Scid IL2Rγ(null) mice. These data demonstrate that TAT-peptide therapies are an alternative approach to retroviral stem cell therapies and suggest that NF-Ya peptide delivery should be further evaluated as a tool for HSC/progenitors ex vivo expansion and therapy.

Sulfites and the wine metabolome.

In a context of societal concern about food preservation, the reduction of sulfite input plays a major role in the wine industry. To improve the understanding of the chemistry involved in the SO2 protection, a series of bottle aged Chardonnay wines made from the same must, but with different concentrations of SO2 added at pressing were analyzed by ultrahigh resolution mass spectrometry (FT-ICR-MS) and excitation emission matrix fluorescence (EEMF). Metabolic fingerprints from FT-ICR-MS data could discriminate wines according to the added concentration to the must but they also revealed chemistry-related differences according to the type of stopper, providing a wine metabolomics picture of the impact of distinct stopping strategies. Spearman rank correlation was applied to link the statistically modeled EEMF components (parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC)) and the exact mass information from FT-ICR-MS, and thus revealing the extent of sulfur-containing compounds which could show some correlation with fluorescence fingerprints.