A novel assessment of the traction forces upon settlement of two typical marine fouling invertebrates using PDMS micropost arrays.

Kang Xiao,Xiao-Xue Yang,Pei-Yuan Qian,Ying Xu,Wen-Bin Cao,Lian-Guo Chen,Yu Zhang,Zhang-Li Hu,Wei-Jia Wen,Cu-Huang Rong

doi:10.1242/bio.030262

Abstract

ABSTRACTMarine biofouling poses a severe threat to maritime and aquaculture industries. To prevent the attachment of marine biofouling organisms on man-made structures, countless cost and effort was spent annually. In particular, most attention has been paid on the development of efficient and environmentally friendly fouling-resistant coatings, as well as larval settlement mechanism of several major biofouling invertebrates. In this study, polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) micropost arrays were utilized as the settlement substrata and opposite tractions were identified during early settlement of the barnacle Amphibalanus amphitrite and the bryozoan Bugula neritina. The settling A. amphitrite pushed the periphery microposts with an average traction force of 376.2 nN, while settling B. neritina pulled the periphery microposts with an average traction force of 205.9 nN. These micropost displacements are consistent with the body expansion of A. amphitrite during early post-settlement metamorphosis stage and elevation of wall epithelium of B. neritina during early pre-ancestrula stage, respectively. As such, the usage of micropost array may supplement the traditional histological approach to indicate the early settlement stages or even the initiation of larval settlement of marine fouling organisms, and could finally aid in the development of automatic monitoring platform for the real-time analysis on this complex biological process.

Highlights

Marine biofouling refers to the undesirable accumulation of living organisms including microorganisms, seaweeds, and animals on submerged surfaces (Callow and Callow, 2002)
As measured from hundreds of tilt microposts, the absolute values of micropost tip displacements caused by settled A. amphitrite and B. neritina were 11.00±0.84 μm (n=188) and 6.02± 1.19 μm (n=277), respectively (Fig. 2B)
The values of traction forces of settled fouling species are 10 times more than the reported contractile forces of human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (Rodriguez et al, 2014), which is possibly due to the difference in the body mass of different organisms

Summary

Introduction

Marine biofouling refers to the undesirable accumulation of living organisms including microorganisms, seaweeds, and animals on submerged surfaces (Callow and Callow, 2002). US navy vessels spend 180 to 260 million US dollars annually to control and prevent biofouling (Schultz et al, 2011). The most commonly employed practice is to coat submerged surfaces with biocidal paints, such as organotin, tributyltin (TBT), Irgarol 1051 and Sea-Nine 211 (Qian et al, 2013). Due to the threat to the marine environment revealed after a long-term application, e.g. toxicity on non-target marine organisms, some biocides were banned or restricted in recent years (Cresswell et al, 2006; Qian et al, 2013). The development of effective and environmentally friendly antifouling technique requires a more in-depth understanding of environmental risk and working mechanisms of antifouling compounds

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion