Abstract
Adhesive secretion has a fundamental role in barnacles’ survival, keeping them in an adequate position on the substrate under a variety of hydrologic regimes. It arouses special interest for industrial applications, such as antifouling strategies, underwater industrial and surgical glues, and dental composites. This study was focused on the goose barnacle Pollicipes pollicipes adhesion system, a species that lives in the Eastern Atlantic strongly exposed intertidal rocky shores and cliffs. The protein composition of P. pollicipes cement multicomplex and cement gland was quantitatively studied using a label-free LC-MS high-throughput proteomic analysis, searched against a custom transcriptome-derived database. Overall, 11,755 peptide sequences were identified in the gland while 2880 peptide sequences were detected in the cement, clustered in 1616 and 1568 protein groups, respectively. The gland proteome was dominated by proteins of the muscle, cytoskeleton, and some uncharacterized proteins, while the cement was, for the first time, reported to be composed by nearly 50% of proteins that are not canonical cement proteins, mainly unannotated proteins, chemical cues, and protease inhibitors, among others. Bulk adhesive proteins accounted for one-third of the cement proteome, with CP52k being the most abundant. Some unannotated proteins highly expressed in the proteomes, as well as at the transcriptomic level, showed similar physicochemical properties to the known surface-coupling barnacle adhesive proteins while the function of the others remains to be discovered. New quantitative and qualitative clues are provided to understand the diversity and function of proteins in the cement of stalked barnacles, contributing to the whole adhesion model in Cirripedia.
Highlights
Sessile marine organisms are bioinspiring for the development of new biomimetic materials and mechanisms
This study focused on the P. pollicipes adhesion system (Figure 1), a species that lives in the Easten Atlantic strongly exposed intertidal rocky shores and cliffs, from the south-west British Isles and France to Morocco [18]
The shotgun proteomics approach employed to profile the proteome of the cement gland and cement of the stalked barnacle Pollicipes pollicipes (Figure 1) allowed the identification of 11,755 peptide sequences in the gland (Table S1) and 2880 peptide sequences in the cement (Table S2)
Summary
Sessile marine organisms are bioinspiring for the development of new biomimetic materials and mechanisms. Barnacles’ attachment is very plastic, as they live holdfast to a variety of substrates, under a variety of hydrologic regimes, in oceanic or coastal habitats, submersed or intermittently immersed in intertidal zones, in protected overhangs, crevices, in the deep sea, or directly exposed to strong waves [1,2]. Adhesive secretion has been evolutionarily optimized, since firm and permanent attachment to the substrate is crucial for goose barnacles’ survival, keeping them in an adequate position on the rocks to meet their oxygen and food requirements, grouped in turfs with hard plates facing outside, to protect their soft stalks from predators, and close enough to mate to conspecifics (Figure 1a) since Itnht.eJ.iMr ofle. Gland secretion passes through a network of ducts that carryTthheeoardighineaslivmeotdoelthoef abdauslet boafrtnhaeclpe’esduunndcelrewfaotremr aidnhgetshioenc[e9m] deenstcr(iCbeesmth.)a.t the cement is secreted to the space between the animal cuticle and the external substrate, containing mainly two types of proteins, interfacial
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