IDENTIFICATION OF MUSSEL FOOT PROTEINS WITH LOW MOLECULAR MASS FROM MYTILUS CORUSCUS PLAQUES

Mytilidae owns a kind of special adhesive protein known as the mytilus foot protein(mfp) which provides secure adhesion in the presence of moisture and therefore become the main candidate for new biological adhesive de-veloping at present.Possessing important economic value,Mytilus coruscus,with strong byssul and excellent adhesion,widely spreads all through the littoral extent of Zhejiang,China,while its foot proteins had rarely been studied.To un-derstand the composition and the characterization of adhesive proteins from Mytilus coruscus several foot proteins were separated by C18 reverse-phase HPLC from the acetic acid-urea extracts of plaques and analyzed by matrix-assisted la-ser desorption ionization time of flight mass spectrometry to determine the mass ranging from3 to 6 kD followed with partially sequencing by Edman degradation.Three of these proteins,containing abundant amount of Dopa,were deter-mined to be variants of a family known as mfp3(mytilus foot protein 3) and the other three proteins were presumed to be novel types of foot proteins,because no results were matched after online BLAST search.Quartz crystal microbalance analysis assay showed that some of these proteins exhibited strong absorption abilities on gold surface,which directly correlated with their adhesion force.Notwithstanding its limitation,this study did build the foundation for further re-search on the molecular diversity of the foot proteins with low molecular mass from Mytilus coruscus and the related adhesion mechanism.