Understanding the phenomenon of bioadhesion in wet or humid conditions may greatly aid biotechnological advances in the design of new surgical adhesives or biohybrid and biomimetic materials e.g. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Work was also supported by European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research (COST Action TD0906). All relevant data are within the Supporting Information files.įunding: Funding was provided by Science Foundation Ireland Contract grant number 09RFPMTR2311 awarded to AMP ( ), and Beaufort Marine Research Awards grant-aided by the Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Government of Ireland, awarded to AMP and co-PIs. The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. Received: ApAccepted: AugPublished: October 8, 2014Ĭopyright: © 2014 Jonker et al. Permyakov, Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Biological Instrumentation, Russian Federation 100 kDa) are more conserved within barnacles than others (20 kDa).Ĭitation: Jonker J-L, Abram F, Pires E, Varela Coelho A, Grunwald I, Power AM (2014) Adhesive Proteins of Stalked and Acorn Barnacles Display Homology with Low Sequence Similarities. The results indicate that some adhesive proteins (e.g. Homology aside, sequence similarity in amino acid and gene sequences tended to decline as taxonomic distance increased, with minimum similarities of 18–26%, depending on the gene. pollicipes possesses homologues for the 19 kDa and 100 kDa proteins in acorn barnacles. Sequence alignment of published expressed sequence tags clearly indicated that P. We also analysed the similarity of adhesive proteins across several barnacle taxa, including Pollicipes pollicipes (a stalked barnacle in the order Scalpelliformes). Antibodies against two acorn barnacle proteins (ab-cp-52k and ab-cp-68k) showed cross-reactivity in the adhesive glands of L. anatifera and closely-related Dosima fascicularis. None of the peptides matched published or unpublished transcriptome sequences, but some amino acid sequence similarity was apparent between L. Mass spectrometry for protein identification was followed by de novo sequencing which detected 52 peptides of 7–16 amino acids in length. Intense bands were present at approximately 30, 70, 90 and 110 kilodaltons (kDa). anatifera adhesive into at least 10 protein bands using SDS-PAGE.

We add to extensive information from the acorn barnacles (order Sessilia) by providing the first protein analysis of a stalked barnacle adhesive, Lepas anatifera (order Lepadiformes). Examination of a broad range of species within the barnacles may be instructive to identify conserved adhesive domains. Barnacle adhesion underwater is an important phenomenon to understand for the prevention of biofouling and potential biotechnological innovations, yet so far, identifying what makes barnacle glue proteins ‘sticky’ has proved elusive.

Acorn barnacle