Science

Scientists look to mussels for super-strong polymers

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A mussel displaying its byssus (Image courtesy Matt Harrington)
Microscopic image of a mussel's byssal cuticle (Image courtesy Susann Weichold)
A mussel displaying its byssus (Image courtesy Matt Harrington)

If you’ve ever gone down to the seashore and tried to pull mussels off rocks (and hey, who hasn’t?), then you’ll know how tenacious their holdfasts can be - although they can be tugged back and forth, it’s almost impossible to actually remove them. Recently, scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces analyzed how the delicious mollusks are able to to achieve such a feat of natural engineering. What they discovered could find its way into human technology.

Mussels attach themselves to rocks with a fibrous appendage called the byssus. The individual byssal threads are stiff but stretchy, in order to dissipate the energy of crashing waves. They are produced by the mussel through a process not unlike injection molding. Because they are constantly being blasted with water-borne debris, they have a protective outer cuticle. This cuticle is described as “a biological polymer”, and while it exhibits epoxy-like hardness, it can also stretch up to 100% without cracking.

When viewed under a scanning electron microscope, the byssal cuticles have a knobby appearance. This is because they contain numerous submicron-sized granular inclusions, which are distributed in a continuous matrix. It is believed that when the cuticle is stretched, submicron-sized tears occur in this matrix, hindering the formation of larger cracks.

Microscopic image of a mussel's byssal cuticle (Image courtesy Susann Weichold)

The cuticles were found to have a high concentration of iron ions, and a modified type of the amino acid commonly called dopa. Dopa is known for its ability to bond with iron ions, creating metal-protein complexes that have a high breaking point, but that also have the ability to pull themselves back together once they have broken. The scientists discovered that the cuticles have a higher density of the dopa-iron complexes around the granular inclusions, while the spaces between the inclusions have less of the complexes - this means that the granules serve as the rigid structure of the cuticle, while the areas between them function in a sacrificial manner, allowing bonds to break before catastrophic failure.

“Nature has evolved an elegant solution to a problem that engineers are still struggling with; namely, how to combine the properties of abrasion resistance and high extensibility in the same material”, says Peter Fratzl, director of the biomaterials department at Max Planck. “Conceivably, this same strategy could be applied in engineered polymers and composites.”

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5 comments
Facebook User
What the hell? Has the author ever been to the beach and tugged off a muscle shell? It\'s really not that hard. In non-national park settings, it\'s kind of cool to tear off a muscle, crush it and feed the muscle to a sea anemone. Hell, when I was younger, several decades ago, my grandfather and I used to tear off muscles and use them for bait when fishing in Baja. I like the technology, but to make it sound unbreakable is just poor reporting.
Facebook User
I think many of our solutions will be found in nature - if we study it close enough, like these mussels. Good articel...
Paul Wiegman
Often the connection between the stuff in nature and the stuff in our daily world seem very far apart. As a naturalist, after showing people a flower, bug, or some other organism the comment is \"That\'s nice, but what good is it?\" For many organisms the value to us isn\'t even remotely apparent. Here\'s a good example ....
Facebook User
Sometimes many of the solutions to our problems can be found somewhere in nature. Maybe scientists should hook up with biologists and a few new things could be derived from that.
Anumakonda Jagadeesh
Yet another breakthrough from Nature. Let us live in harmony with Nature and get more and more Innovations for a bright world.
Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India