Putting life on ice: bacteria that bind to frozen water
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ice-binding proteins (IBPs) are typically small, soluble proteins produced by cold-adapted organisms to help them avoid ice damage by either resisting or tolerating freezing. By contrast, the IBP of the Antarctic bacterium Marinomonas primoryensis is an extremely long, 1.5 MDa protein consisting of five different regions. The fourth region, a 34 kDa domain, is the only part that confers ice binding. Bioinformatic studies suggest that this IBP serves as an adhesin that attaches the bacteria to ice to keep it near the top of the water column, where oxygen and nutrients are available. Using temperature-controlled cells and a microfluidic apparatus, we show that M. primoryensis adheres to ice and is only released when melting occurs. Binding is dependent on the mobility of the bacterium and the functionality of the IBP domain. A polyclonal antibody raised against the IBP region blocks bacterial ice adhesion. This concept may be the basis for blocking biofilm formation in other bacteria, including pathogens. Currently, this IBP is the only known example of an adhesin that has evolved to bind ice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".