13:00 - 14:00,
Weds 18 January, 2023

PLT, Science concourse

Prof. Gibson et al will deliver their RSC 2022 Chemistry Biology Interface Division Horizon Prize Lecture.

This is a departmental lecture for all students and staff. Please come along. Refreshments will be provided.

Chemical CryoBiology: Why you should care about ice

Matthew. I. Gibson, Thomas Whale and Gabriele Sosso
and quite a few others!

The transition from water to ice is ubiquitous on Earth and is a key part of our planet’s life cycles. But how do organisms survive in extreme cold environments, and if we understand how they do this, can we create new materials to mimic them?

In this talk ’Team-Ice’ at Warwick will discuss their RSC Horizon Prize research into using chemistry to understand and modulate ice formation and to apply this to global challenges from sustainability to healthcare. We will discuss:

How we have developed an understanding of how ‘antifreeze proteins’ function by using synthetic materials chemistry and how these new ‘macromolecular cryoprotectants’ are being used to enable biotechnological processes.

How polysaccharides produced by pollen may impact our climate by inducing freezing of cloud droplets, can we understand the physical chemistry of how these work and apply this to encourage extra-cellular ice formation during cell storage.

The use of molecular simulations and machine learning to provide insights and molecular-level details that cannot be obtained experimentally. This includes predicting new compounds to inhibit ice growth without needing to make them, accelerating the discovery process.

Key Recent References

• Nature Reviews Chemistry 2022, 6, 579. Chemical Approaches to Cryopreservation
• Chemical Science, 2022 13, 5014, The role of structural order in heterogeneous ice nucleation
• Nature Communications, 2021, 12, 2675. A minimalistic cyclic ice-binding peptide from phage display
• Nature Communications, 2021, 12, 1323, The atomistic details of the ice recrystallisation inhibition activity of PVA
• Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2021, 143, 7449. Polymer Self-Assembly Induced Enhancement of Ice Recrystallization Inhibition
• Materials Horizons, 2020 7, 1883, Ice Recrystallisation Inhibiting Polymer Nano-Objects via Saline-Tolerant Polymerisation-Induced Self-Assembly
• Nature Methods, 2019, 16, 670, Promoting transparency and reproducibility in enhanced molecular simulations
• Chemical Science, 2018, 9, 8077, Unravelling the origins of ice nucleation on organic crystals
• Nature Communications, 2017, 8, 1546, Polymer Mimics of Biomacromolecular Antifreezes