NASA's Hunt for Clues to Life on Solves Mystery of Red Wine Headaches

It looks like NASA might have found a new goldmine for funding its space adventures -that is, assuming it has a piece of of one of it's leading scientists recent discoveries!

The Associated Press have reported that Researchers at University of California, Berkeley, working with NASA funded technology designed to look for chemical signs of extraterrestrial life on have created a device they say can easily detect chemicals that many scientists believe can cause the common "red wine headache."

Apparently one of the NASA technology's creators, Richard Mathies (director of the Centre for Analytical Biotechnology at UC Berkeley) also happens to be a wine lover and he blames the amines in wine for his headaches. Mathies told CBS Station KPIX that :

"What intrigued me is that I observed, with certain wines that I ingested I had a significant hypertensive response, which scared me a little bit.”

Mathies designs high-tech tools for two very different kinds of detectives. On Earth, his group is developing instruments that will be used by forensic scientists to help solve crimes using DNA analysis. A similar system could also aid astrobiologists in hunting for life on without ever stepping foot on the red planet.

Mathies is the inventor of capillary electrophoresis arrays and energy transfer fluorescent dye labels, common technologies in today's DNA sequencers. Now he's combining those innovations with a microscale plumbing system to build an entire genetics laboratory on a chip.

The chip is the key component in the Organic Analyzer, an instrument that will probe the Red Planet's soil for amino acids, the building blocks of organic life. The Organic Analyzer may travel to the Red Planet as early as 2009 aboard either NASA's Science Laboratory, the European Space Agency's Exomission, or possibly both.

Back to those splitting wine headaches: some wines even led Mathies to wake up in the middle of the night. "That's when the light bulb went off and I realized I could use the Organic Analyzer as a way of testing wines."

Mathies' prototype is currently the size of a small briefcase and uses a drop of wine to determine amine levels in 5 minutes.

Like most good Silicon Valley area enterpreneurs, Mathies has co-founded a startup company to create a smaller device so that users can take it along to a restaurant and bar where (along with bouquet and colour) a wine's amines can be appraised. Mathies suggests the device could be used to put amine levels on wine labels.

Wine experts might suggest that Mathies should have simply changed his wine to the Old World wines from Italy, France and Spain (they don't give headaches if you drink them) rather than convert his Mars Organic Analyzer, but it probably wouldn't lead to an IPO!

The Old World wine producers tend to use time honoured methods which are renowned throughout the world vs. the cheap, mass produced wines which use quick fixes to solve the fermentation and maturation processes.

Scientists can not definitively say what it is in some red wines that causes headaches but they have nominated several culprits including amines like tyramine and histamine. Histamine is a candidate as it is released from mast cells as part of an allergic reaction in humans.

Some wines led Mathies to wake up in the middle of the night. "That's when the light bulb went off and I realized I could use the Mars Organic Analyzer as a way of testing wines."

Tyramine is found in both plants and animals - in foods it is often produced by the fermentation or preservation process. Foods containing considerable amounts of tyramine include pickled, smoked, aged or marinated meats (fish, poultry, pork and beef), fermented foods such as most cheeses, yoghurt, soy sauce, sauerkraut, chocolate and red wine. It's also found in avocados, bananas, aubergines, figs, raspberries, peanuts, brazil nuts, and coconuts.

Posted by Casey Kazan

Story links:

http://sciencematters.berkeley.edu/archives/volume1/issue6/story3.php
http://bordeaux-undiscovered.blogspot.com/2007/11/nasas-mars-alien-life-form-detector.html
http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/blogs/editor/2007/11/red-wine-headac.html