Happy Spring
 |
Snow flakes can have bacteria
at the center |
As Spring gets started and the American midwest is hopeful that the snow will finally melt away and
the Polar vortex of the 2014 winter will be done already, there's a bacterium--
Pseudomonas syringae-- that can
control the weather, cause
frost damage to plants, and it also bears the distinction of being the
first GMO approved for release to the environment. In fact, this bacterium might even explain the ice powers of
Elsa in
Frozen -- maybe she just had the right bacteria at her fingertips.
Snow -- and hail and rain -- can be caused by bacteria. It's not that bacteria are synthesizing the water, but bacteria can serve as the nucleation point, encouraging water molecules to surround them and form a droplet. This means that all those unique snowflakes have a structure something like a Tootsie roll pop. Except instead of a candy center, when you catch a snowflake on your tongue and it melts away, the delicious center is a tiny cluster of bacteria.
Controlling the Weather
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| Making it rain |
This may seem like an idle curiosity, but the implications of this are actually pretty amazing. Bacteria could potentially help us control the weather. Bacteria (or the proteins they use to nucleate water) are already used in snow machines at ski resorts, and have been used in some pilot studies to look at
using drones to seed the air around Lake Tahoe with bacteria to encourage more snow to fall. If approaches like this are successful, one could imagine a future where we actually coax rain from clouds to alleviate drought.
The Frost Queen
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Snow machines make use of
bacterial technology |
The organism responsible for water nucleation is most often
Pseudomonas syringae, and it's an organism everyone should know. In order to make it rain, this organism has to survive up in the atmosphere miles above the surface--and it does. How does it get there? Well, it primarily grows on the surfaces of plant leaves, and is accustomed to getting blown around by the wind so that it can colonize new plant leaves. But it's not always benevolent.
P. syringae is a pathogen for many species of plant, and it's ability to encourage ice to form means that it is often responsible for frost damage killing plants.
The First GMO
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| Bacteria encourage frost during cold snaps |
P. syringae also bears the distinction of being
the first genetically modified organism (GMO) approved to be released into the environment, back in 1987. The idea was to spray crops with mutants that lack the ice-nucleating proteins. It worked, and protected the plants from damage, but as far as I know wasn't cheap enough to go on to wide spread use.
The genetically modified P. syringae were sprayed on plants to prevent frost damage but I am wondering if this could cause further damage to the ecosystem by allowing P. syringae without ice nucleating properties into the atmosphere. It seems that colonization of this "antifreeze" GMO would ultimately cause more rain instead of snow causing water to transition to new locations prematurely rather than staying as packed snow until the spring.
ReplyDeleteThe introduction of new organisms in to the environment is an understandable concern, and ecosystem-safe testing procedures can be difficult to design. In fact, the introduction of P. syringae caused some vehement protests. In this case, it was fairly easy to establish that Ina- strains (non-nucleating) were already present in the wild and outcompeted by the Ina+ strains. One more clarifying point: the Ina- strains are defective at nucleating both ice and water.
ReplyDeletePiggy backing on Carolyn's comment, couldn't the introduction of P. syringe affect the lives of other organisms in a certain ecosystem? By introducing P. syringe and allowing them to affect weather patterns, is there any way these weather patterns can become dependent on P. syringae. I was just thinking that if P. syringae is used to induce rain or snow, then this could alter the types of plants or types of organisms that live in certain areas.
ReplyDeleteHuma: That question is an interesting one, and certainly introduction of new organisms in the envionment could have unexpected consequences, but in the case of P. syringe it is already so ubiquitous that it's hard to envision what terrestrial ecosystem hasn't been exposed to this bacterium.
ReplyDeleteGrowing up on a farm, frost was a huge issue with damaging crops during some years. Would the utilization of the genetically modified P. syringe on say citrus trees such as oranges and lemons help prevent frost damage or would it hurt the oranges and lemons? Is the bacteria strong enough to protect the crops from freezing temps or are they better for less intense temperatures?
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, that is definitely what happened to Elsa. Second of all, I am assuming that P. syringae is not harmful to us because, I have caught my fair share of rain drops and am fine. I was wondering if the mutated version of it caused any known problems to us. I know drinking anti-freeze isn't the best idea ;) ...
ReplyDeleteThe inducing rain idea popped into my head when I started reading this article. Has there been any advances on this topic? Has it been done? Are there more factors that just releasing more bacteria into the air?
Because Pseudomonas syringae was the first GMO to be approved for release into the environment, this makes me wonder about the qualifications that a possible GMO must meet in order to gain this approval. What precautions are being taken? It is understandable that it is impossible to predict if the bacterium will act in the manner that you want once it is released. I just picture the government with this giant file on strategies to eliminate Pseudomonas syringae should it start to grow beyond their idea of control, complete with blueprints and everything. Perhaps even a tank, as useless as that would be in a situation such as this, but hey this is government.
ReplyDelete- Laura Fong
The consequence of releasing mutated P. syringae into the environments is probably hard to distinguish and quantify. However, efforts should still be put into understanding human actions on the ecosystem. On a different note, has this ever been used on a commercial level for refrigerators or for transporting temperature sensitive products? I think there's potential for the use of P. syringae for cooling products that could decrease the use of electricity. It does seem difficult because of its living requirements.
ReplyDelete- Alina Nguyen