Mussel Power (03.16.00) - A team of researchers in Idaho discovered that the quest for a better adhesive may end in a common shellfish that we eat on a regular basis.
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Wouldn't it be great if instead of sewing you up, surgeons could glue you back together? To do that they would need a strong, nontoxic, waterproof glue. As this ScienCentral News video reports, scientists are learning how a simple shellfish makes a super adhesive.
Sticky Stuff
They're a yummy addition to any meal, but blue mussels have a secret recipe that may help scientists "mussel in" on the ideal surgical adhesive.
"Mussels are really fun organisms because they create these interesting adhesives," says Jonathan Wilker, chemistry professor at Purdue University. "Mussels are able to stick themselves onto surfaces, and we're really interested in what the glue is that they use to do this."
Each mussel uses its "foot" to anchor itself by filaments, often called the mussel's "beard," to rocks or other slippery surfaces with glue that is waterproof and strong enough to prevent waves and tides from budging them. "Mussels like to attach to surfaces and when they attach to surfaces they cluster together," says Wilker, who has 800 mussels in his lab. "It's actually difficult to pull one mussel off of a rock, partly because the adhesive is so strong, but also partly because it's clustered so tightly with other mussels that you can't really get your fingers around it. So there's a protection from predators by adhering to surfaces…. [That's] one of the reasons why they make their glue."
Scientists already knew that mussel glue is made of proteins, but more research was needed. "The mussel glue is based on proteins, and proteins are biological polymers. It's known that barnacle cement is also based on proteins," says Wilker. "But a lot of the materials in the ocean, there's really not a lot known about them, so the real basics of how these materials form is exactly what we're studying right now."
This mussel is showing us its byssal threads, adhesive plaques, and foot.
Wilker and his team analyzed the arrangement of the ingredients in mussel glue using various spectroscopic techniques and tested the adhesive properties of components of mussel glue. They discovered that iron plays a key role in its strength. The mussels filter iron from surrounding seawater in the same way they collect food, they concentrate the iron and then mix the iron with the glue proteins to set, or cure, their glue. "This is the first time that anyone's found that a metal like iron is essential to forming a biological material that's not crystalline the way a seashell is," says Wilker.
This finding should help scientists to create more new and improved materials. In fact, Wilker's team is already making and testing new synthetic adhesives based on mussel glue that may one day be used in the operating room. "One of the potential applications of this material is the development of surgical adhesives," says Wilker. "If you think about what you need to make a good surgical adhesive, you want something that can set in a wet environment, you want something that creates a strong bond, and you want something that is biologically compatible and not toxic. So possibly the material that these animals produce would fill those criteria."
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