Review Report of Underwater Adhesions
Reasons for cooperation
All students contributed equally to the completion of the review report
Introduction
Adhesions are part of our daily lives that we simply take for granted. It is present and applicable to many of the daily products that we use to biomedical adhesives. Naturally produced adhesives are common in many biological systems and are known for their superior strength and durability compared with man-made materials. The properties of an adhesive are both related to its chemical and physical components. Many marine organisms have developed adhesive strategies to deal with the dynamic ocean environment, particularly at the tidal interface. Many of such underwater organisms include barnacles, mussels and more.
This report provides an analysis of the adhesives used by different underwater organisms which are mussels, squid and the sandcastle worm.
Background
Dickson et al. (2009) [1] analyzes the key chemical components of the cement proteins produced by Amphibalanus amphitrite, otherwise known as a barnacle. Barnacles produce a cement adhesion that involves cross protein polymerization which Dickson et al. (2009) [1] have hypothesized to be biochemically similar to blood clotting. Barnacle settlements were cultivated on glass panels coated with silicone for two months. An x-ray microtomography was conducted to analyze the internal structure of the barnacle. To analyze the chemical components of the cement, cement droplets were obtained by hand through stimulating barnacle growth after cleaning the barnacles. This was done within 5 minutes so as to prevent the cement from polymerizing and hardening. With the aid of tandem mass spectrometry and atomic force microscopy, the cement was analyzed for both the chemical components of proteins and ensuring the cement collected was not any other body fluid that the barnacle might produce. The analysis of the cement proteins was done to investigate the...