Abstract
Barnacles are notorious marine fouling organisms, whose life cycle initiates with the planktonic larva, followed by the free-swimming cyprid that voluntarily explores and searches for an appropriate site to settle and metamorphoses into a sessile adult. Within this life cycle, both the cyprid and the adult barnacle deposit multi-protein adhesives for temporary or permanent underwater adhesion. Here, we present a comprehensive review of the biochemistries behind these different adhesion events in the life cycle of a barnacle. First, we introduce the multiple adhesion events and their corresponding adhesives from two complementary aspects: the in vivo synthesis, storage, and secretion as well as the in vitro morphology and biochemistry. The amino acid compositions, sequences, and structures of adult barnacle adhesive proteins are specifically highlighted. Second, we discuss the molecular mechanisms of adult barnacle underwater attachment in detail by analyzing the possible adhesive and cohesive roles of different adhesive proteins, and based on these analyses, we propose an update to the original barnacle underwater adhesion molecular model. We believe that this review can greatly promote the general understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the reversible and irreversible underwater adhesion of barnacles and their larvae. Such an understanding is the basis for the prevention of barnacle fouling on target surfaces as well as designing conceptually new barnacle-inspired artificial underwater adhesives.
Highlights
Many marine creatures inhabiting the wave-swept seashores, such as mussels (Waite, 2017), tubeworms (Stewart et al, 2011b), and barnacles (Kamino, 2006), have evolved the capability of synthesizing, secreting, and curing biological adhesives for temporary or permanent underwater adhesion
KC152471) has been isolated from Balanus glandula. It plays the same role as Settlement-Inducing Protein Complex (SIPC) in promoting gregarious attachment of cyprids, and functions as a feeding stimulus that induces barnacle predators hunting for barnacles (Ferrier et al, 2016). Another main purpose of the SIPC is functioning as an adhesive protein to facilitate the temporary adhesion of cyprids
Foot protein-3 and fp-5 that bind to the substrate directly are located at the plaque-substrate interface, whereas fp-2 and fp-4 that form foam-like internal structures linking interfacial adhesive proteins and byssus thread structural proteins are distributed within the plaque (Waite, 2017)
Summary
Many marine creatures inhabiting the wave-swept seashores, such as mussels (Waite, 2017), tubeworms (Stewart et al, 2011b), and barnacles (Kamino, 2006), have evolved the capability of synthesizing, secreting, and curing biological adhesives for temporary or permanent underwater adhesion. Barnacle Underwater Adhesion for both the design of biomimetic adhesives that can function in aqueous environments (Lee et al, 2011; Zhong et al, 2014; Zhao et al, 2016) and the development of new antifouling technologies (Del Grosso et al, 2016; Amini et al, 2017) Owing to their wide distribution in the world’s oceans, and robust, gregarious underwater attachment, barnacles are among the most dominant marine fouling organisms. Using more complex video-/tracking-based approaches, the dynamic cyprid surface exploration process under different conditions was monitored, offering a real-time and quantitative method of understanding the settling behaviors of a cyprid by measuring its swimming velocity, step length and duration, body movements, footprint deposition, and so on (Marechal et al, 2004; Andersson et al, 2009; Chaw and Birch, 2009; Maleschlijski et al, 2012; Aldred et al, 2013b, 2018; Maleshlijski et al, 2016)
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