Ice nucleation activity in the widespread soil fungus Mortierella alpina
By J. Fröhlich-Nowoisky, T. Hill, B. Pummer, Petya Yordanova, G. Franc, Ulrich Pöschl. 2015
171 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract. Biological residues in soil dust are a potentially strong source of atmospheric ice nuclei (IN). So far, however, the abundance, diversity, sources, seasonality, and role of biological – in particular, fungal – IN in soil dust have not been characterized. By analysis of the culturable fungi in topsoils, from a range of different land use and ecosystem types in southeast Wyoming, we found ice-nucleation-active (INA) fungi to be both widespread and abundant, particularly in soils with recent inputs of decomposable organic matter. Across all investigated soils, 8% of fungal isolates were INA. All INA isolates initiated freezing at −5 to −6 °C, and belonged to a single zygomycotic species, Mortierella alpina (Mortierellales, Mortierellomycotina). To our knowledge this is the first report of ice nucleation activity in a zygomycotic fungi because the few known INA fungi all belong to the phyla Ascomycota and Basidiomycota. M. alpina is known to be saprobic and widespread in soil, and Mortierella spores are present in air and rain. Sequencing of the ITS region and the gene for γ-linolenic elongase revealed four distinct clades, affiliated to different soil types. The IN produced by M. alpina seem to be proteinaceous,
Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98c1cce52085254bb6a2ec5ad901c02d71439e54
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Citations in the corpus
- Ice nucleation by water-soluble macromolecules (2014, methodology): “The previously characterized INMs from Rhizoplaca chrysoleuca (Kieft and Ruscetti, 1990), F. avenaceum (Pouleur et al., 1992; Hasegawa et al., 1994; Tsumuki and Konno, 1994), and M. alpina (Fröhlich-Nowoisky et al., 2015) are evidently proteins, but show hardly any other similarities with the BINMs.”