Research Progress of Plant Antifreeze Proteins and Their Advanced Structures

Antifreeze proteins (AFPs) are a family of proteins capable of controlling the growth of ice and inhibiting the recrystallization between ice granules and possess two distinct antifreeze activities which are termed thermal hysteresis (TH) activity and recrystallization inhibition (RI) activity respectively. The characteristics of antifreeze activities of plant AFPs are the low TH activity and high RI activity. Though there is a distinct difference in DNA and amino acids with almost no homology, plant AFPs display similar advanced structures and ice-binding sites. Moreover, the interaction between ice and all plant AFPs can be explained well by the model Surface Complementarity. In this paper, the species and characteristics, advanced structures, and ice-binding sites of plant AFPs being researched at present were completely discussed.