Proteomics of gushing wine!

There are times when carbonated wine like Champagne is supposed to look like the picture above.  Example:

However, if you haven't just won an NBA championship or the World Cup or are the heel in a dumb Hollywood comedy, the wine isn't supposed to just go shooting out of the bottle. You're supposed to drink it. When you intend to drink it, but it all goes shooting out of the bottle this is called "gushing" and it is a problem with the wine making process and people want to know what causes it and how to stop it.

PROTEOMICS TO THE RESCUE!! (Abstract link here.)

This group takes a look at gushing wine and the grapes they came from and compare them to non-effected wine/grapes. The work is mostly done with HPLC separation, SDS-PAGE (for relative quantification) and MALDI-TOF identification.

Turns out a sometimes handy (under the right conditions -- tasty) fungus that infects grapes is to blame here and they work their way down to a really convincing protein band that appears exclusively in the gushing wines.

BOOM! Biomarker identified! If you find this protein at high abundance in your grapes or juice you might not want to spend months/years making wine from it.

I like this paper because 1) it's a problem I didn't know existed 2) this team seems to go right out with some of our technology and solve it 3) it's a really clever use of our technology's in kind of a unconventional way. And they walk away with a biomarker!?!?