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Mahesh

20/01/24 10:05 AM IST

The fungi that can freeze water better than bacteria

In News
  • Scientists have even found that completely pure water can remain unfrozen until it’s cooled to temperatures below minus 46 degrees C.
Water Freezing
  • To freeze, water molecules need to arrange themselves in an ordered way and form a crystalline structure.
  • But ice formation is also kinetically hindered, meaning it requires a bit of extra energy – especially for the first step, called ice nucleation. This energy demand is not small.
  • To correctly orient themselves to create a crystalline structure, water molecules also need an initiation point, or a nucleus – a place that can serve as a surface on which the ice crystals can grow.
  • This nucleus could be an ice particle or an impurity like dust, minerals, or microorganisms commonly found in water.
  • The lack of these nucleators prevents pure water from freezing, whereas less-pure tap water readily freezes at minus 5 degrees C in our refrigerators.
How does life make ice?
  • Bacteria, P. syringae can start ice formation at temperatures just below the melting point of water (0 degrees C).
  • These bacteria produce special ice nucleation proteins (INPs) near their cell membranes, which become anchor points for water molecules to start forming ice crystals. Water freezes around the INPs so well it nearly mimics natural ice.
  • Bacterial INPs are so good at making ice that ski resorts often use a commercial snowmaking product, called Snowmax, which consists of INPs bound to inactivated or dead P. syringae to start the crystallisation process.
Fungi formation
  • Fungi produce highly efficient ice nucleators that can cause water to start crystallising at temperatures as warm as minus 2 degrees C.
  • Their presence in the soil, the atmosphere, and cloud water-samples has led scientists to suggest they may be able to influence both local and regional weather patterns, if not global.
  • But unlike bacterial ice-nucleators, the macromolecular structures and interactions in fungal nucleators were still a mystery at the time the study was conducted.
  • The fungus’s nucleators were also some 25-times smaller than those of the bacteria but still comparably efficient.
  • And because they’re released into the environment, scientists have an opportunity to use the fungal proteins without having to kill the fungi, unlike artificial snow-makers that currently use dead bacteria.
Source- The Hindu

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