London, Aug 15 (ANI): Scientists claim to have finally discovered the powerful adhesive responsible for the amazing sticking power of the blue mussels, Mytilus edulis.

They have said the mussel's glue has an amazing adhesive property that enables it to stick itself firmly to different surfaces, even in watery conditions where most other glues fail.

It can stick to metal oxides, organic surfaces, polymers, even non-adhesive things like Teflon, said materials engineer Phillip Messersmith at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, US.

For their study, Messersmith and his colleagues analysed the amino acid, dopa, which make up a large percentage of the mussels' five known glues.

They used an atomic force microscope to compare the break-strength of the dopa bond between two different surfaces. They also tested an inorganic material often used for medical implants - titanium oxide - and then a typical organic surface and found that unoxidised dopa showed a strong bond with the titanium, which could be reversed so the glue potentially would be unsticky again.

On the other hand, oxidised dopa formed a rock-solid, permanent bond with the organic surface.

The pH (acidity) level of sea water is such that both the oxidised and unoxidised states exist simultaneously. It's this plurality of chemical interactions that begins to tell us why mussels are so good at adhering to different surface-chemistry, Messersmith added.

Messersmith now believes their discovery will lead to super strength yet versatile medical glue.

He said the flexibility could have useful applications, such as attaching medical implants to materials like bone, which is made up of the inorganic mineral calcium, water and organic compounds like proteins.

Now, Messersmith and his team is studying the property of the mussel adhesive to help design coatings that actually prevent other organisms, such as algae or bacteria, from sticking to surfaces.

These results can help steer the design of novel polymers that may even match the mighty mussel. But, Dopa doesn't exist all by itself in a mussel plaque, so the experiments have a limited ability to tell us how natural adhesives work, New Scientists quotes Emily Carrington, a marine biomaterials expert at the University of Washington's marine lab in Friday Harbor, US as saying.

The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (ANI)