Wine yeast typing by MALDI-TOF MS

For the production of wine, the most important industrially used yeast species is Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Years of experience have shown that wine quality and property are significantly affected by the employed strain conducting the fermentation. Consequently, the ability of a strain level differentiation became an important requirement of modern winemaking. In our study, we showed that the differentiation by time-consuming and laborious biochemical and DNA-based methods to enable a constant beverage quality and characteristics can be replaced by matrix-assisted-laser-desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS), accompanied by the additional benefit of an application prediction. Mass fingerprints of 33 Saccharomyces strains, which are commonly used for varying wine fermentations, were generated by MALDI-TOF MS upon optimized sample preparation and instrument settings and analyzed by a cluster analysis for strain or ecotype-level differentiation. As a reference method, delta-PCR was chosen to study the genetic diversity of the employed strains. Finally, the cluster analyses of both methods were compared. It could be shown that MALDI-TOF MS, acting at proteome level, provides valuable information about the relationship between yeast strains and their application potential according to their MALDI mass fingerprint.