The ice nucleation ability of one of the most abundant types of fungal spores found in the atmosphere
By R. Iannone, D. I. Chernoff, Anne Pringle, S. Martin, A. Bertram. 2010
106 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract. Recent atmospheric measurements show that biological particles are a potentially important class of ice nuclei. Types of biological particles that may be good ice nuclei include bacteria, pollen and fungal spores. We studied the ice nucleation properties of water droplets containing fungal spores from the genus Cladosporium , one of the most abundant types of spores found in the atmosphere. For water droplets containing a Cladosporium spore surface area of ~217 μm 2 (equivalent to ~5 spores with average diameters of 3.2 μm ), 1% of the droplets froze by −28.5 °C and 10% froze by –30.1 °C. However, there was a strong dependence on freezing temperature with the spore surface area of Cladosporium within a given droplet. Mean freezing temperatures for droplets containing 1–5 spores are expected to be approximately −35.1 ± 2.3 °C (1σ S. D.). Atmospheric ice nucleation on spores of Cladosporium sp. , or other spores with similar surface properties, thus do not appear to explain recent atmospheric measurements showing that biological particles participate as atmospheric ice nuclei. The poor ice nucleation ability of Cladosporium sp. may be attributed to the surface which is coated with hydrophobins (a class of hydrophobic proteins that appear to be widespread in filamentous fungi). Given the ubiquity of hydrophobins on spore surfaces, the current study may be applicable to many fungal species of atmospheric importance.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c7009810f5df3561eef03db306de996a384366ea
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Citations in the corpus
- Ice nucleation by water-soluble macromolecules (2014, background): “Similarly to the bacteria, only a limited fraction of investigated strains showed INA, while the majority was inactive (Pouleur et al., 1992; Tsumuki et al., 1995; Iannone et al., 2011; Pummer et al., 2013a; Huffman et al., 2013; Fröhlich-Nowoisky et al., 2015).”
- Ice nucleation activity in the widespread soil fungus Mortierella alpina (2015, unknown): “…activity in a zygomycotic fungi, as, previously, all reported INA fungi belonged to the phyla Ascomycota and Basidiomycota (Jayaweera and Flanagan, 1982; Kieft and Ahmadjian, 1989; Henderson-Begg et al., 2009; Iannone et al., 2011; Haga et al., 2013; Huffman et al., 2013; Morris et al., 2013) .”
- Suspendable macromolecules are responsible for ice nucleation activity of birch and conifer pollen (2012, background): “Concerning nucleation rate calculations, it has to be admitted that the suggested volume dependence is only exact for homogeneous freezing, while for heterogeneous freezing it is determined by the amount of IN per droplet (Iannone et al., 2011).”
- Characterization of active and total fungal communities in the atmosphere over the Amazon rainforest (2015, background): “These temperatures are warmer than what has been measured for Penicillium spores (Iannone et al., 2011) although not as warm as what has been measured for other biological particles including other spore types (Morris”
- Biogeography in the air: fungal diversity over land and oceans (2011, unknown): “So far, all reported IN-active fungi belong to the AMC (Jayaweera and Flanagan, 1982; Kieft and Ah-madjian, 1989; Pouleur et al., 1992; Henderson-Begg et al., 2009; Iannone et al., 2011), but recent findings indicate that there are also IN-active fungal species from other phyla.”