ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Nanoscopy of single antifreeze proteins reveals that reversible ice binding is sufficient for ice recrystallization inhibition but not thermal hysteresis.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Discovering naturally occurring antifreeze peptides from microbiome by integrating protein language models and molecular dynamics simulation.Journal of materials chemistry. B · 2026Article
- Molecular mechanisms of plant freezing tolerance: from cold signal perception to adaptive responses.Frontiers in plant science · 2026Review
- Adsorption Barrier Limits the Ice Inhibition Activity of Glycan-Rich Antifreeze Glycoproteins.Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids · 2025Article
- Inhibition of ice recrystallization with designed twistless helical repeat proteins.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Integrated Antioxidants, Nanoparticle, and Antifreeze Protein Strategies Synergistically Enhance Cryotop Vitrification Outcomes of Porcine Parthenogenetic Embryos.Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Fully Atomistic Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Ice Nucleation Near an Antifreeze Protein.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025Article
- Rate-Engineered Plasmon-Enhanced Fluorescence for Real-Time Microsecond Dynamics of Single Biomolecules.Nano letters · 2024Article
- On the engulfment of antifreeze proteins by ice.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Extended Temperature Range of the Ice-Binding Protein Activity.Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids · 2024Article
- Article
- De novo designed ice-binding proteins from twist-constrained helices.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Antifreeze proteins (AFPs) bind ice to reduce freezing temperatures and arrest ice crystal ripening, making AFPs essential for the survival of many organisms in ice-laden environments and attractive as biocompatible antifreezes in many applications. While their activity was identified over 50 years ago, the physical mechanisms through which they function are still debated because experimental insights at the molecular scale remain elusive. Here, we introduce subzero nanoscopy by the design and incorporation of a freezing stage on a commercial super-resolution setup to resolve the interfacial dynamics of single AFPs with ice crystal surfaces. Using this method, we demonstrate irreversible binding and immobilization (i.e., pinning) of individual proteins to the ice/water interface. Surprisingly, pinning is lost and adsorption becomes reversible when freezing point depression activity, but not ice recrystallization inhibition, is eliminated by a single mutation in the ice-binding site of the AFP. Our results provide direct experimental evidence for the adsorption-inhibition paradigm, pivotal to all theoretical descriptions of freezing point depression activity, but also reveal that reversible binding to ice must be accounted for in an all-inclusive model for AFP activity. These mechanistic insights into the relation between interfacial interactions and activity further our understanding and may serve as leading principles in the future design of highly potent, biocompatible antifreezes with tunable affinity.
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