Snow-causing bacteria

A research team from LSU, Montana and France had found evidence that rain and snow are started by bacteria who are able to catalyse precipitation at lower temperatures than grit and dust:

Dust and soot particles can serve as ice nuclei, but biological ice nuclei are capable of catalyzing freezing at much warmer temperatures. If present in clouds, biological ice nuclei may affect the processes that trigger precipitation...

But, what makes this research more complicated is that most known ice-nucleating bacteria are plant pathogens. These pathogens, which are basically germs, can cause freezing injury in plants, resulting in devastating economic effects on agricultural crop yields.

Link

[#1 posted by Sam , February 29, 2008 1:46 AM]

So which came first, the rain or the plant?

[#2 posted by raisedbywolves , February 29, 2008 2:09 AM]

Holy crap, that is weird. It will be interesting to see how this research develops!

[#3 posted by Kieran O'Neill , February 29, 2008 2:19 AM]

To quote Berk from The Trapdoor
"Ain't nature wonderful?"

[#4 posted by Zozobra , February 29, 2008 2:40 AM]

Howdy, 1st post on boingboing - go easy on me.

This isn't terribly new stuff. The idea was initially floated in the late 60's that bioaerosol might be an efficient ice nuclei.

A good review can be found in introduction of 'The ice nucleating ability of pollen Part I' (Diehl et al, 2001) for anyone interested in the workings of it. A pdf should be available - try sciencedirect.

Some new aerosol fluorescence technologies should make measurement of this sort of thing much easier and I look forward to getting some kit on an aircraft and dragging it through some cloud!

[#5 posted by indemnitypop , February 29, 2008 6:36 AM]

Ice NIIIIINE.

[#6 posted by Barry Foy , February 29, 2008 7:49 AM]

Even as an animist from way back, it strikes me as a bit much to refer to bacteria as "who" (see intro sentence). With all due respect to our micro-friends, "that" is probably more appropriate.

[#7 posted by A New Challenger , February 29, 2008 11:35 AM]

Indemnitypop beat me to it.

[#8 posted by marye11en , February 29, 2008 12:57 PM]

Zozobra is right: this is not new. In fact, bacterial ice nucleation was first discovered in 1989 (RTFA, people).

S. E. Lindow, E. Lahue, A. G. Govindarajan, N. J. Panopoulos, D. Gies, Mol. Plant-Microbe Interact. 2, 262 (1989).

This is so NOT new that all snowmaking at resorts uses the recombinant ice nucleating protein produced by Pseudomonas syringae. Google "Snomax."

What is new is that MOST of the ice nucleating particles in the atmosphere were shown to be of biological origin, not from abiotic particles (ie., dust) as previously thought.

[#9 posted by Kieran O'Neill , February 29, 2008 4:00 PM]

I really like the idea that a large amount of our (snow? hail?) could simply be a phase in a bacterial life cycle. I haven't yet got hold of the Science article, but I do hope that they have plans to test this hypothesis.

[#10 posted by ankh , February 29, 2008 5:20 PM]

> plant pathogens

And what does this suggest?

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=353138

http://aem.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/67/4/1494