Suspendable macromolecules are responsible for ice nucleation activity of birch and conifer pollen

By B. Pummer, H. Bauer, J. Bernardi, S. Bleicher, H. Grothe. 2012

304 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract. The ice nucleation of bioaerosols (bacteria, pollen, spores, etc.) is a topic of growing interest, since their impact on ice cloud formation and thus on radiative forcing, an important parameter in global climate, is not yet fully understood. Here we show that pollen of different species strongly differ in their ice nucleation behaviour. The average freezing temperatures in laboratory experiments range from 240 to 255 K. As the most efficient nuclei (silver birch, Scots pine and common juniper pollen) have a distribution area up to the Northern timberline, their ice nucleation activity might be a cryoprotective mechanism. Far more intriguingly, it has turned out that water, which has been in contact with pollen and then been separated from the bodies, nucleates as good as the pollen grains themselves. The ice nuclei have to be easily-suspendable macromolecules located on the pollen. Once extracted, they can be distributed further through the atmosphere than the heavy pollen grains and so presumably augment the impact of pollen on ice cloud formation even in the upper troposphere. Our experiments lead to the conclusion that pollen ice nuclei, in contrast to bacterial and fungal ice nucleating proteins, are non-proteinaceous compounds.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e0c84a49870777d65da03dc13a8fec8a61a916cf

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Citations in the corpus

Online coupled regional meteorology chemistry models in Europe: current status and prospects (2013, background): “Other biogenic emissions of potential relevance for air quality simulations and chemistry–meteorology interactions are NO emissions from soils (Yienger and Levy II, 1995) and emissions of bacteria, fungal spores and pollen which have been reported to act as efficient ice nuclei (e.g. Hoose et al., 2”
Ice structures, patterns, and processes: A view across the icefields (2012, background): “Airborne terrestrial biological particles such as bacteria, lichen, and fungal spores (Szyrmer and Zawadzki, 1997), pollen (Pummer et al., 2012), and lofted marine species such as diatoms (Knopf et al.”
Ice nucleation by water-soluble macromolecules (2014, methodology): “We measured peptide solutions with 10, 20, and 30 mg mL−1 using the oil immersion cryo-microscopic method, which is described in detail in Pummer et al. (2012).”
The adsorption of fungal ice-nucleating proteins on mineral dusts: a terrestrial reservoir of atmospheric ice-nucleating particles (2016, background): “While atmospheric INPs are rare in comparison to CCN (DeMott et al., 2010; Pruppacher and Klett, 1997), they exert a disproportionate effect on cloud properties such as albedo, extent, lifetime, dynamics and conversion to precipitation (Rosenfeld et al., 2011; Storelvmo et al., 2011; Boucher et…”
Immersion freezing of ice nucleation active protein complexes (2012, background): “, ice nucleation active protein complexes from other bacteria or macro-molecules from pollen (Pummer et al., 2012; Augustin et al., 2012), under the condition that the IN considered as one type all feature similar ice nucleation properties and that these IN are Poisson distributed over the droplet p”
Overview of Ice Nucleating Particles (2017, background): “…shown that biological ice nucleating active macromolecules (INMs) with sizes of only ; 10nm can separate from their carriers, for example, pollen (Pummer et al. 2012), fungal spores (Fr ö hlich-Nowoisky et al. 2015), and marine organic aerosol (Wilson et al. 2015) and from organic material in…”
Ice nucleation activity in the widespread soil fungus Mortierella alpina (2015, unknown): “Apart from rust fungi and pollen IN, which are thought to be non-proteinaceous (Pummer et al., 2012; Morris et al., 2013), evidence points to proteins as the source of ice nucleation activity of the known INA fungi (Fusarium, lichen mycobionts) (Kieft and Ruscetti, 1990; Hasegawa et al.”
Biological aerosol particles as a key determinant of ice nuclei populations in a forest ecosystem (2013, background): “The lifetime of pollens in the atmosphere is probably very short, because their sizes are typically larger than 20μm, but the possibility for the existence of fragments of pollens serving as IN could potentially be important [e.g., Pummer et al., 2012].”