Bacterial Ice Nucleation Protein

In my Microbiology course at the University of Puget Sound, I like to demonstrate the wild and wonderful and weird microbial world. In this video, I supercool a bottle of water to approximately -6 degrees C. I then a drop of a Pseudomonas syringae culture. This organism makes an ice nucleation protein, which allows the supercooled water to immediately change to water you watch. This causes “oohs“ and “ahhs“ each year! Enjoy! This is based on an exercise I learned from Dr. Jo Handelsman of Yale University. UPDATE: this video has been picked up by various media outlets, and I didn’t even know about it! Thank everyone for your interest. It is indeed genuine, and ice nucleation by bacteria is a real phenomenon. I wrote about it on my blog here---please have a look for further information: