Plasma membrane sterols are involved in yeast's ability to adsorb polyphenolic compounds resulting from wine model solution browning.

The aim of this work was to demonstrate the direct interaction between membrane sterols of yeast lees and some polymerized phenolic compounds resulting from wine model solution browning. For this purpose, we first demonstrated by measurement of steady-state fluorescence anisotropy of the cationic fluorescent TMA-DPH probe the effect of polymerized compounds from the model reactions of (+)-catechin/acetaldehyde and (+)-catechin/glyoxylic acid on the plasma membrane order of Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast lees enriched with different sterols. In a second set of experiments, we used S. cerevisiae plasma membrane vesicles spiked with different sources of sterol (ergosterol, cholesterol or a mix of grape phytosterols) to assess the effect of the same polymerized compounds on both vesicle integrity and membrane leakiness to protons by ACMA fluorescence. All the obtained results prove that yeast membrane sterols are able to strongly interact with some polymerized compounds resulting from the browning of model solutions, likely explaining the yeast ability to adsorb polyphenolic compounds and mainly the colorless intermediate compounds of the browning reactions.