BLACKSBURG, Va., March 11 -- Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University issued the following news release:
Can fungi influence the weather?
Turns out, they just might.
An international group of researchers that includes Virginia Tech's Xiaofeng Wang and Boris A. Vinatzer discovered the identity of fungal proteins that can catalyze ice formation at high subzero temperatures. The research is published in Science Advances.
One potential application of this discovery could be to engineer weather.
In a process called cloud seeding, particles that can trigger the water in the clouds to turn into ice crystals, called ice nucleators, are released into clouds. The ice crystals then grow in size as more and more water molecules stick to...