Building a beetle antifreeze
Friday, March 2, 2012 - 09:30
in Biology & Nature
Animals and plants have evolved all sorts of chemical tricks that allow them to colonize extreme environments. For species that call Antarctica or the Arctic home, surviving sub-zero temperatures is an essential ability, and chemists have isolated many natural antifreeze compounds from these organisms. The antifreeze called xylomannan, which is produced by the freeze-tolerant Alaskan beetle Upis ceramboides, is being studied by Akihiro Ishiwata and Yukishige Ito at the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute at Wako and their colleagues. Their findings to date show that xylomannan is a particularly unusual antifreeze.