Bio-inspired adhesives – BioGLUE

In our daily lives, all conventional man-made adhesives are petrochemical products, which are toxic for the body and show limited efficiency in wet conditions, major drawbacks for biomaterials. In this project, we aim at producing adhesives effective in air and/or in wet conditions inspired by natural glues of some arthropods. For these animals, the adhesion mechanism seems to be related to protein self-assembly on the surface. The adhesive proteins show particular sequences with repetitive architectures that allow a genetic engineering strategy for the production of biomimetic adhesives. The structural properties and the self-assembly of engineered adhesive-like proteins will be characterized as well as their adhesion on different model materials. This approach using simplified mimics of biological adhesives will facilitate better understanding of systems from which they are derived and could find applications in medicine as well as in biotechnology and industry.