Yale Researchers Turn a Peptide From Cholera Bacteria Biofilms Into an Underwater Glue
A Yale University team showed that a peptide derived from Vibrio cholerae biofilms adsorbs onto various surfaces and glues wet surfaces together, testing it with lap shear tests, atomic force microscopy, confocal microscopy, and molecular dynamics simulations. The peptide also clumped with microspheres, acting as a flocculant. Most underwater adhesive designs copy mussels and barnacles, and the Science Advances paper proposes bacterial biofilms as another model.