When does an ice binder become an ice nucleator?

The formation and growth of ice is crucial to our climate, food security and delivery of advanced therapies. Ice binding proteins (IBPs) can both stop ice growing (‘antifreeze proteins’) or nucleate it (ice nucleating proteins), but when an AFP becomes an ice nucleating protein is not clear? The GibsonGroup, working with an international team of collaborators, have shown how a synthetic polymer mimic of an AFP can nucleate ice, as a function of the size of the polymer. This was achieved using a series of very sensitive microfluidic ice nucleation measurements. The work is important as it makes progress towards how ice nucleators can be deployed for areas such as cryopreservation, where supercooling of water (i.e freezing at very low temperature) is a major challenge.

Read the paper here

Ice nucleation in aqueous solutions of short- and long-chain poly(vinyl alcohol) studied with a droplet microfluidics setup

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0136192