Molecular Engineering of a Spider Silk and Mussel Foot Hybrid Protein Gives a Strong and Tough Biomimetic Adhesive

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A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

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en

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13

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Advanced Materials Interfaces, Volume 11, issue 8

Abstract

High performance bio-based materials are an important part of future sustainable technology, and engineered proteins provide excellent possibilities as functional polymers. Adhesives are widely needed for composite materials and biomimetic structures. In biological adhesives, two features have emerged as especially interesting—the role of coacervation and the presence of 3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine (DOPA). To study these, protein engineering is used to construct a hybrid silk-mussel foot protein (mfp) adhesive. Tyr residues in the purified mfp are oxidized to DOPA and an encoded SpyCatcher-Tag system allowed easy click-chemistry to couple silk and mfp and to study the parts separately. The combined silk-mfp protein have a strong tendency to coacervate. DOPA affected the properties of coacervates and increased adhesion by several ways of measuring. In lap shear testing, the combined mfp-silk protein is superior to any of the components studied separately. Coacervation is suggested to contribute to the adhesion of silk-mfp, and shows several features suggested to lead to the strength and toughness of natural adhesives. In the lap shear system, coacervation have a stronger overall effect on adhesion than the presence of DOPA. The results show that protein design provides a route toward high performance biosynthetic polymers and future sustainable materials.

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Funding Information: The authors acknowledge the light microscopy unit of the institute of biotechnology, University of Helsinki for providing facilities and support for FRAP experiments and OtaNano Nanomicroscopy center for access to their SEM facility. The authors thank Mohammad Mubinur Rahman for his expertise in optimizing the method for modification of tyrosine residues and Roosa Ilvonen for her contribution in protein expression and purification. They authors thank Juan Valle Delgado for his guidance in the characterization of coacervate adhesion by AFM. This work was funded by the Research Council of Finland (formerly the Academy of Finland) through projects # 317395, #326345, #346105 the Center of Excellence Program (2022‐2029) in Life‐Inspired Hybrid Materials (LIBER), and by the Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF20OC0061306). Publisher Copyright: © 2024 The Authors. Advanced Materials Interfaces published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.

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Yin, Y, Roas-Escalona, N & Linder, M B 2024, 'Molecular Engineering of a Spider Silk and Mussel Foot Hybrid Protein Gives a Strong and Tough Biomimetic Adhesive', Advanced Materials Interfaces, vol. 11, no. 8, 2300934. https://doi.org/10.1002/admi.202300934