Professor Examines Red Wine’s Healthy Chemistry

Scott Snyder has always loved red wine, and recently his interest has extended well beyond the dinner table. Several years ago, the associate professor of chemistry became fascinated by the “French paradox,” the relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease among the French despite a diet high in saturated fats.

Scott Snyder Image credit: Eileen Barroso/Columbia University

The phenomenon has been linked to red wine consumption, and almost all the evidence points to a chemical called resveratrol. Although scientists have been studying the headline-making substance for decades, no one has yet been able to harness its positive effects despite studies in mice linking it to weight loss and improved neural and cardiac function.

Snyder believes the benefits come not from resveratrol itself but from a family of organic structures called oligomers, which are formed when resveratrol molecules bind with one another.

\"These unique structures appear to have useful health properties,” Snyder says. “But nature produces them in limited amounts, and they are hard to obtain from organic sources. By figuring out a way to create them in the lab, we can study them, understand them and perhaps adjust the structures and make something even better.”

Resveratrol is found in grapes and other plants, where it acts as a defense mechanism against foreign substances. When a plant is attacked by fungus, for example, resveratrol molecules bond like Lego blocks to make oligomers, which serve as a barrier to the infection. Think of it as a plant version of the human body’s immune response.

“The plant can make between 60 to 100 new structures just from resveratrol,” says Snyder, whose team is based in Havemeyer Hall. “We think we found a general strategy to make the more complex members of oligomers.”

In 2007 he and his team were the first to create synthetic oligomers from two resveratrol molecules. In a paper published in the June 23 issue of Nature, Snyder demonstrated a new technique to build oligomers with three and four resveratrol molecules.

Snyder recently won the DuPont Young Professor Grant, which recognizes original research in chemistry and other sciences. Last year, he received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, which supports the work of promising early career scientists.

Snyder’s work has broad medical implications. One of the compounds Snyder has replicated in the lab can aid in preventing ultraviolet sun damage in humans. Another appears to be able to modulate Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that causes nerve cells in the brain to waste away. Others could be used to reverse aging, fight infections and help the body accept organ transplants.

Widespread clinical applications are a good five to 10 years away, but Snyder is accustomed to painstaking work. Indeed, he seems to live his life by the scientific method. An avid cook, he’ll work on a specific dish for weeks, tinkering with ingredients and cooking procedures until it’s just right; he recently perfected a recipe for lamb ragu. In the summer he gardens, experimenting with different soils.

Snyder’s scientific training started early. His mother taught high school calculus and his father was a biochemistry professor at SUNY Buffalo. Snyder started tagging along with his father to his lab as an elementary school student. “He would give me food colors, stir bars and a lab notebook and say, ‘Mix these and tell me what you get.’” Snyder attended Williams College, received his Ph.D. from the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University in the lab of Elias J. Corey, a chemist who won the Nobel Prize for innovations in synthesizing organic compounds.

As for the supposed health benefits of resveratrol, does Snyder think that Americans should do as the French do and simply drink a glass or two of red wine each day? As a wine lover, he has no problem with that. But as a scientist, it won’t do.

“We are too complex of a system,” he says. “Unless we have the capability to really study it, with a dose and response, we can never really say for a society what it means. There’s no science behind it.”

—by Beth Kwon