This Fungus Can Make Water Freeze

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Fungi are truly weird and impressive-they can live anywhere, be poisonous or medicinal, and, reportedly, transform plastic waste into edible ingredients. And in more fungal news, some groups of fungi can literally foster the formation of ice.

In a recent Science Advances paper, researchers describe a newly identified fungal protein that triggers ice formation at temperatures as high as 28.4 degrees Fahrenheit (-2 degrees Celsius). That's obviously below the freezing point of water, but in nature, freezing isn't that simple. Forming the first tiny seed of ice-an ice nucleator-takes energy, and ice forms very slowly at temperatures above -50 degrees F (-46 degrees C), according to the paper.

Yet, we still get things like clouds-microscopic water droplets and ice crystals-thanks to ice nucleators. For the new study, the team tracked the fungal gene associated with the ice-triggering protein to a distant bacterial ancestor from millions of years ago, according to a Virginia Tech statement.Importantly, the fungal protein molecule offers a non-toxic, more efficient alternative to current approaches to weather engineering, food production, or the preservation of cells and organs.

[...] For the new study, the researchers studied a common soil fungus from the Mortierellaceae family, which they extracted from water and lichen samples collected during previous polar expeditions. DNA sequencing pointed the team to certain genes that closely resembled those inside known bacterial ice nucleators-not unheard of, but rare nonetheless. To check that they were on the right path, the researchers planted these proteins onto other yeast and bacteria, which indeed manifested previously non-existent ice-making abilities.

Even more remarkable was the fact that, upon further analysis, the fungus wasn't simply copying a bacterial ancestor. Instead, it had adopted a highly effective trait of the bacteria and adapted it to their own physiological requirements," the team noted in the statement.

It's a bit the same and yet different," explained Rosemary Eufemio, the study's lead author and a biochemist at Boise State University. Fungi use the same repetitive sequence architecture as bacteria for their ice-forming sites but have made them more soluble and stable, which probably benefits their ecological function."

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