Australian scientists have unlocked the secrets of naturally occurring antifreeze proteins which could protect crops against frost damage, extend the shelf life of donated organs and even make ice cream taste better.

Antifreeze proteins bind to ice and stop it from growing, and it is these proteins that allow cold-climate plants and animals to survive in their sub-zero environments, like fish who live in the frigid waters of Antarctica.

The research, published in the E-Life journal, was led by Dr Michael Kuiper from Victoria's Life Sciences Computation Initiative.

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"Fish swimming around in this environment will naturally come into contact with ice crystals, because there's just so much ice in the water, and there's the anti-freeze proteins in the blood that keep the ice crystals small," he said.

"If the anti-freeze protein weren't there, the ice crystals would actually grow and freeze the fish solid."

In a world first, Dr Kuiper's team used a supercomputer to simulate the molecular forces that make antifreeze proteins work.

"We could actually visualise how the structure of the protein matched, if you like, the lattice of the ice, and then stuck to the surface of the ice," he said.

"So it's very much like buttons on a chesterfield couch, where the buttons are the antifreeze proteins and it causes the curvature, it's the curvature that's actually very important in this, because the extra surface area on the ice crystal is actually energetically unfavourable, so it stops the ice from growing."

The computer modelling was so painstaking that it would have taken a normal computer 47 years to do the same calculations.

The breakthrough could lead to genetically modified crops that can withstand frost.

"Another big thing we'd love it to be applied to is actually organ transplants," Dr Kuiper said.

"The trouble with organ transplants is you have to transplant the organ very quickly from the donor to the recipient. And you have to make sure that it's the correct match.

"Now if we could store these organs for longer without the damage of freezing, then that could be a better thing, you might have better outcomes with that sort of process."

Dr Kuiper said the same proteins are already used as an ingredient in some ice creams.

"If you store things like ice cream at a warmer temperature it tends to go crunchy, and that's because larger crystals will grow at the expense of smaller crystals.

"However if you have something like an anti-freeze protein in there, it will actually inhibit that migration of the ice crystals and keep all the crystals and ice smooth."

Farmers can lose 100 per cent of crops to frost

Tasmanian apple and cherry grower Howard Hansen knows a thing or two about frost damage.

His trees are at their most vulnerable in early spring, when the temperature in his southern Tasmanian orchards can drop as low as minus 4 degrees.

"In frost-prone blocks, you could very easily lose 100 per cent of them, it's not something you just lose a small percentage of ... generally if you lose crop-to-crop frost, you lose a pretty big percentage," Mr Hansen said.

"The other thing, sometimes you don't lose them completely but they're actually damaged."

To reduce the risk of damage, Mr Hansen uses massive wind towers to ward off the frost.

"So they're like a large vertical tower, which is about 10 metres off the ground, with a big fan that's run by [a] 200-horsepower diesel engine and it actually pulls the warmer air from above the crop and pulls it down to where the crop is, this hopefully raising temperatures so that it's above zero."