Bacterial ice-nucleation proteins
Bacterial ice-nucleation proteins is a family of proteins that enable Gram-negative bacteria to promote nucleation of ice at relatively high temperatures. These proteins are localised at the outer membrane surface and can cause frost damage to many plants. The primary structure of the proteins contains a highly repetitive domain that dominates the sequence. The domain comprises a number of 48-residue repeats, which themselves contain 3 blocks of 16 residues, the first 8 of which are identical. It is thought that the repetitive domain may be responsible for aligning water molecules in the seed crystal.
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