September 23, 2014 — Fish in McMurdo Sound and elsewhere in the seas around Antarctica have to survive in temperatures below freezing. It’s not surprising, then, that they have evolved natural antifreeze proteins.
What is surprising is that the proteins that latch on to ice crystals in the body of the fish and prevent them from growing also prevent the ice from melting. Paul A. Cziko and other researchers in the United States and New Zealand reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday that they had found superheated ice in the fish, known as notothenioids.
That means that the ice crystals that were attached to antifreeze proteins stayed intact, even when solutions containing them, or fish containing them, were warmed past their expected melting point.
Read the full story from the New York Times