Abstract
Adhesion is a vital physiological process for many marine molluscs, including the mussel and scallop, and therefore it is important to characterize the proteins involved in these adhesives. Although several mussel byssal proteins were identified and characterized, the study for scallop byssal proteins remains scarce. Our previous study identified two foot-specific proteins (Sbp7, Sbp8-1), which were annotated as the tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMPs). Evolutionary analysis suggests that the TIMP genes of Chlamys farreri had gone through multiple gene duplications during evolution, and their potential functional roles in foot may have an ancient evolutionary origin. Focusing on the Sbp8-1, the sequence alignment and biochemical analyses suggest that Sbp8-1 is an atypical TIMP. One significant feature is the presence of two extra free Cys residues at its C-terminus, which causes the Sbp8-1 polymerization. Considering the fact that the no inhibitory activity was observed and it is mainly distributed in byssal thread and plaque, we proposed that this atypical Sbp8-1 may play as the cross-linker in scallop byssus. This study facilitates not only the understanding of scallop byssus assembly, also provides the inspiration of water-resistant materials design.
Highlights
It is already well-known that adhesion is one of the most important physiological processes for marine molluscs, which is vital for food procurement, locomotion, defense, breeding and attachment (Gorb, 2008)
We discovered 75 proteins from Chlamys farreri byssus based on transcriptomic approach and further identified seven foot-specific scallop byssal protein (Sbp) components based on proteomic approach (Miao et al, 2015)
Metalloproteinase inhibitor was identified in the soluble fraction from proximal thread (Qin et al, 2016). These findings suggest that tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMPs) genes may play important roles for the assembly and function of byssus in bivalves, which is likely of ancient evolutionary origin
Summary
It is already well-known that adhesion is one of the most important physiological processes for marine molluscs, which is vital for food procurement, locomotion, defense, breeding and attachment (Gorb, 2008). Many organisms were adversely affected by tides and waves, and in response to this situation many marine molluscs have evolved their ability to live by adhering themselves to other materials (Yang et al, 2013). Adhesion widely exists in marine molluscs indicating this is a crucial physiological event for these organisms. Extensive amounts of efforts were put to characterize the adhesives from sessile organisms such as mussels, barnacles, or tube-dwelling worms (Naldrett and Kaplan, 1997; Taylor and Waite, 1997)
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