Fantastic Fungi Freeze Water, Control the Weather
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Last Show with David Cooper, where we utilize nonlinear reverse inverse backward thinking protocols. It sounds like this. Imagine I told you I could freeze water. Well, if I own a fridge, it's not that impressive. But what if I told you I could do it without a fridge and that I was fungus? Well, there's a form of fungus that can freeze water. And we're here to learn about it here with chemistry professor at Boise State University and at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. His name is Conrad Meister. Conrad, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So this sounds like total science fiction, like something out of a movie, a fungi, a fungus, funguses, I never know how to say that word properly, that can freeze water.
What is going on? Paint a picture for me here. Yeah, I think it's been super unexpected for us as well, because I think the journey started actually...
What unique ability does the fantastic fungi have?
being us going to some of these very cold places. In this case, it was in Alaska. And then when you're in Alaska and you see all these lichen, which are basically fungus mixed with some other microbes, you realize that for some reason these lichens can survive freezing super well. and that is of course very nice to begin with but then you want to know how can they do that and then we started looking into it and we really found that there's this fungus that's super good at ice making and then we poked a bit further and then we saw it's not only the fungus there's something in the fungus that's so good at ice making and so then the real bizarre thing was that These fungi that are so good at ice making, you not only found on the ground, but you also seem to find them basically in the clouds and in precipitation.
So that really raises the question of what makes It rain and why does this fungus have this capability? Fungus in the clouds? How do you even discover that? What's going on? Yeah, that's the weird thing because we always obviously want to know why does it rain and what causes cloud precipitation, I think is the word. We make ice in the clouds so that it comes down. And I think the idea is not completely new, because they had found some bacteria, some plant fragments up there, and then sometimes they found these fungal spores. But now we're actually starting to understand why and how good these fungi really are at ice making, because they are pretty exceptional. And they're also pretty much close to being indestructible, so that makes it a really, really interesting product as well.
So ice obviously needs cold temperature to form. What is the trick here? What are the funguses doing to create ice, like in warmer conditions? Yeah, so, I mean, obviously in high school, we all learn like, hey, below zero degree, it should be ice. Above that, it should be liquid water. But in reality, it's almost like you need like, I always say like, hey, you're standing on this cliff and you want to jump in the water because it's nice and warm, but someone has to push you because you're afraid. So you need this, what we call like a trigger or a nucleator. And the fungus, they produce these proteins that are basically a bit of like a mirror image of ice. So they have like a pattern that looks almost like ice just built by a certain biomolecule, like a protein.
And so basically on that, it enables the water to really fit very, very nice in like this ice-like pattern. And then it makes ice at a very, very warm temperature. It's sort of like ice is the key and the fungus is providing the keyhole, like a molecular structure so that ice can form? Exactly. So it's like a molecular structure that's basically... So if you think about water in... solution it's like a chaos it's like a wild club dancing like everything is completely randomized but now if we add these fungi proteins it's almost like i forced to dance them more in like this old school middle age dancing so now they're already all very well aligned because then once they become ice they're basically stuck in their positions right and that's why for instance ice floats right because ice is much more structured um and so you basically enable them with with this um
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