Fantastic Fungi Freeze Water, Control the Weather

0:00This episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing Company. No matter how you do game day, on the couch, in the crowd, or manning the snack table, Athletic Brewing fits right in. With a full lineup of non-alcoholic beer styles, you can enjoy bold flavors all game-long. No hangovers, no buzz, no subbing out for water in the second half. Stuck the fridge for tip-off with a variety of non-alcoholic craft styles available at your local grocery store or online at AthleticBrewing.com. Near beer, fit for all times. The last show with David Cooper, where we utilize non-linear reverse inverse backward

1:10thinking 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, fungus is, I never know how to say that word properly, the can freeze water. What is going on? Who would 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 being us going to some of these very cold places in this case, it was in Alaska and then when you, 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 lichen can

2:11survive 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 is 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're not only found on the ground, but you also seem to find them basically in the clouds and then 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 where we make ice in the clouds so that it comes down. I think the idea is not completely new because they had found some bacterial, some plant

3:13fragments up there and then sometimes they found these fungal spores, but now we 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 undestructible, so that makes it really, really interesting product as well. So ice obviously needs cold temperature to form. What is the trick here? What are the fungus is doing to create ice in warmer conditions? Yeah, so obviously in high school we all learn like, hey, if 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 would 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. So basically on that it enables the water to really fit very, very nice in like this ice

4:18like 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 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 that's like a chaos, it's like a wild club dancing, like everything is completely randomized. But now if we add these fungi proteins, those arms, like I forced to dance them more in like this old school middle age dancing. So now they already all very well-wined 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. And so you basically enable them with this, with this structure, you create this pattern and effect off this water. And then it basically forces the water to not being let's say wild discodense about water to be like in a stuck state.

5:19Why would the fungus want to do this? Like evolutionarily, what's the advantage? Yeah, that's one big question. And I'm obviously like a canvas, so I don't really know too much about some of the biological questions, but to the colleagues I talked to and when we start thinking about it. So there's a few things that the fungi might benefit. It might actually want this ability to get around, because I mean we all want to see places. And if the fungus would be trapped in the situation and it basically would be on the host and there's not enough nutrition, how would the fungus get from A to B? And one way could be to actually go all the way in the atmosphere and then rain down somewhere else and that starts to colonize over there. That's one big thing. The other thing is that these fungi are freeze-tolerant. That means at parts of the state they actually can survive being in a semi frozen state. And that could be useful, for instance, if you have very cold places like the Arctic, is like at some point there's just simply no food and gets too cold that you don't really want to be around. And so I can go almost in this like dormant state. And if I want to be in a dormant state, it's kind of a very nice way to kind of initiate

6:23the freezing outside of the fungus and then slowly pull out the water rather than being frozen right away because then I could damage something that I don't want to have to be damaged. Maybe the fungus isn't thinking on the time scale of humans. It's thinking like, okay, well, there was an ice age, I don't know, 20, 30, 50,000 years ago. There might be another ice age and 100,000 years. I got to survive that. I mean, it's actually a very good idea because there's also these stories that we see that, for instance, with the primer for smelting in the Arctic that there are certain fungi and bacteria trapped that have been frozen for such a long time and we don't really know what's what we're going to get out of those. Would we use this technology or these funguses to seed the clouds, to control the weather? I know I'm sounding like a conspiracy theorist right now, but is it doable? It's not only doable, but it's actually something we're actively working on because one thing you have to imagine is they're very good at ice making and currently with seeding the

7:24clouds or companies that are seeding the clouds, they do that with silver iodide, which is a chemical, which is not ideal on many ways because it's a chemical product versus a biological product. And if you can think about, we don't want to seed with the fungi, but we want to seed it with the active compound out of the fungi. And so that would be a really interesting way to kind of get some form of an environmentally fending cloud seeding, which I think is a much better idea than using a chemical. Yeah, currently, our thoughts around cloud seeding involve what toxic chemicals and things like this? Exactly. That's the current thought. I think one should also think about sometimes with the cloud seeding, I'm technically not a big fan of saying like, hey, we want to change weather patterns because that's face it's never a good idea to play that, however, if we could prevent, you know, like if you see there's a really dangerous storm coming towards regions and you can see that storm earlier so that it's going to go off, let's say, over the ocean rather than over like

8:25an important aquaculture or ecological part, then I think it's not a bad idea at all. But I personally also still think I'm a scientist, I'm a really just curious. But as you said, why the heck would the fungi be so good at isomic? It seems like everywhere we look, like deep ocean where there's no light deep in the earth's crust like under, I don't know, tons and tons of rocks, seems like these life forms exist, even where we don't think they will. Were you surprised by them existing up in the clouds as particular fungus? Yes, and no, maybe because you're right, I think a lot of times we just imagine and we've probably heard about these hydro-termalvents too, we go to the bottom of the ocean and there shouldn't supposed to be any life and it's full of life and so yes, I'm very surprised that we found so much and such a diversity up there. There is nothing cooler than fungus and I appreciate you coming on the show and talking

9:26about these ice-making fungi or as it fungus is, I don't know Conrad. I actually think no one would even know us. That's the deep question. Conrad Meister is a chemistry professor at Boise State University and at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Conrad, thanks again for being on the show. Thanks a bunch, Jason. Welcome to Survivor 50 Wednesdays on global. It shows you to represent 25 years of the greatest adventure on television and all we want is everything. This is the Survivor Coliseum and do or die. Like your torch and be a part of history. Survivor, all new Wednesdays at 80s turn on global, stream on Stack TV.