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Timing, Science and Technology - A team of scientists from the United States and France have found evidence that bacteria "cause-rain" is widespread in the atmosphere.
These biological particles could factor heavily into the precipitation cycle, affecting climate, agricultural productivity and even global warming. The new findings are published in the journal Science quoted by Xinhua on Friday.
The research team examined precipitation from global locations and demonstrated that the most active ice nuclei-substrate that enhances the formation of ice-biological in origin. That's important because the formation of ice in clouds is required for snow and most rainfall.
Researchers have found biological ice nuclei in a rainwater sample from Antarctica to Louisiana-material exists everywhere.
Dust and soot particles can serve as ice nuclei, but biological ice nuclei are capable of catalyzing freezing at much warmer temperatures.
The concept of rain-making bacteria is not much different. Many ski resorts use baktei ice-nucleating commercially available in frozen form to make snow when the temperature just a few degrees below freezing.
What makes this research more complicated is ice-nucleating bacteria are the most widely known are plant pathogens. Pathogens, which are basically germs, can cause freezing injury in plants, resulting in devastating economic impact on yields.
"As is often the case with bacterial pathogens, other phases of their life cycle are frequently ignored because of interest in their role in plant or animal health," said Christner Bren, one of the study's authors from Louisiana State University.
"Transport through the atmosphere is a very efficient dissemination strategy, so the ability of a pathogen to affect its precipitation from the atmosphere would be advantageous in finding new sources."
Possible that the atmosphere represents one facet of the infection cycle, the bacteria infects a plant, multiplies, is aerosolized into the atmosphere and then delivered to a new plant through atmospheric precipitation.
"The role that biological particles play in atmospheric processes has been largely overlooked. Our results provide an impetus for atmospheric scientists to start thinking about the role these particles play in precipitation, "said Christner. (Between)
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