Bioinspired Materials Science and Engineering

5Preparation and Application of Biomimetic Materials Inspired by Mussel Adhesive Proteins

Heng Shen, Zhenchao Qian, Ning Zhao, and Jian Xu*

Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

5.1 Introduction

Mussels are a kind of common marine organisms. They exhibit strong adhesive ability and can attach themselves to the surface of boats, rocks, and other organisms, bearing the impact of storm and waves. Surprisingly, mussels can adhere to almost all kinds of substrates, even including the surface of Teflon which is considered a non‐sticky surface due to its low surface energy. Their versatile, strong, and long‐term adhesion in a wet environment attracts a lot of research attention.

It is found that the mussels adhere to the solid surface through byssus in a radial pattern, and every byssus forms an adhesive disk of several square millimeters with substrate. Allen and Wilker [1, 2] measured the adhesion strength of a single adhesive disk of different mussels to the rock surface and found it was between 0.3–6 MPa. There are 25–30 kinds of proteins in byssus, and 7 or 8 proteins exist in the area of the adhesive disk. These specific proteins are called mussel foot proteins (mfp) by Waite and co‐workers [3]. Among these mfps, mfp‐1 [4, 5] is mainly distributed in the cuticle and it is related to the high strength and high toughness of the byssus but is not involved in the interface adhesion. Mfp‐2 [6, 7] and mfp‐4 [8] are mainly distributed ...