Development and Applications of Antifreeze Materials: From Nature to Design

Ice formation poses significant challenges across multiple domains, including biomedicine, food industry, infrastructure, and intelligent sensors, where freezing environments can cause serious functional and safety issues. The development of effective antifreeze materials has become an urgent priority. Nature offers valuable insights in this regard, having evolved diverse psychrotolerant organisms from microorganisms to plants and fish. Within these organisms, key small molecules and macromolecules responsible for cold tolerance have been progressively identified. Inspired by them, recent years have witnessed the design and synthesis of a series of high-performance antifreeze materials through biomanufacturing or chemical synthesis. This review highlights the significant progress in antifreeze materials, tracing their evolution from natural models to rational design systems: (1) natural antifreeze materials and their mechanistic insights, with emphasis on molecular lessons for ice inhibition; (2) biomanufacturing and rational design of antifreeze proteins based on emerging structure-activity relationships; (3) nature-inspired synthetic antifreeze materials, such as polymers, hydrogels, and elastomers; and (4) key applications in cryopreservation, food preservation, anti-icing coatings, and freezing-tolerant flexible sensors. While promising advances have been made, this review also addresses persistent challenges in translating these laboratory innovations into scalable applications.