A synthetic adhesive inspired by the sticky proteins made by mussels can bind to wet surfaces more tightly than even live mussels can.

Previous mussel-mimicking adhesives were strong when dry, but less effective underwater. Jonathan Wilker and his colleagues at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, created a polymer with some of the same structural elements as the sticky protein threads that mussels make to attach themselves to rocks and other surfaces.

Previous adhesives had catechol chemical groups attached to a synthetic polystyrene backbone, but the new material incorporates these groups into the backbone, as mussels' adhesive proteins do. This may explain the polymer's high degree of stickiness underwater, the authors say.

ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces http://doi.org/bz8n (2017)