How Do You Clean Up An Oil Spill?

Mussels bind to surfaces using byssus threads. Understanding how these threads piece of work may assist researchers address water contamination. Paul Kay/Getty Images hibernate caption

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Paul Kay/Getty Images

Mussels bind to surfaces using byssus threads. Understanding how these threads piece of work may assist researchers accost water contamination.

Paul Kay/Getty Images

Mussels may be popular among seafood lovers, but many boaters consider them pests. They colonize transport bottoms, clog water pipes and stick to motors.

To chemical engineers, though, those very same backdrop make mussels marvelous. They tin can stick to just nearly any surface — and underwater, no less. The study of practical applications for mussel biology is so widespread that there'due south a special term for information technology: mussel-inspired chemical science.

And now, researchers believe that studying how mussels stick to things may assistance them address h2o pollution, according to a review of recent mussel-inspired chemistry advances, published this week in the periodical Matter. While almost technologies studied notwithstanding aren't widely applicable, research in the area of mussel-inspired water cleanup shows great promise, the review says.

The Earth Economical Forum calls inadequate access to clean water i of the greatest societal risks facing the planet today. And water access will only worsen as the climate changes, populations increase and industrial production ramps up. Then scientists have been trying to effigy out efficient methods of cleaning water by tackling how information technology interacts with solid materials, like membranes and sorbents (materials that soak up oil).

Mussels' stickiness is prime written report material for those interested in water cleanup. It involves a chemical interaction between substances that makes them adhere even underwater, which is usually very difficult to do, says J. Herbert Waite, a distinguished professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies the biochemistry of marine organisms.

"It's intuitive to most people that if y'all're trying to glue things together, you don't even endeavour to practise it underwater," Waite says. "The main reason is that water, as a molecule, likes to stick to surfaces more than than — and meliorate than — nearly glues." By studying how mussels are able to create stickiness beneath the body of water, engineers can better understand how surfaces interact with substances amid water, and ultimately, they could create materials that may help split h2o from contaminants.

Mussels' stickiness works similar this: They bind to surfaces using strands called byssus threads, which stream out from their shells like wild, gummy beard hairs. Each thread contains an amino acid group called DOPA, which helps information technology bind well to nearly any surface underwater.

Engineers take been able to mimic the DOPA that mussels make by taking dopamine (yeah, that dopamine — which plays a office in our encephalon's reward circuitry) and using it to synthesize a chemical called polydopamine, or PDA. And PDA can be turned into an adhesive similar to that of a mussel's byssus threads.

You tin can do a lot of things with water and PDA. For case, Seth Darling, a study co-author, and his colleagues explored using PDA to create an interface that repels charged particles and attracts h2o. This technology could help us make clean up wastewater polluted with heavy metals. Other groups are working on membranes that attract oil but repel water, a engineering science that could be useful in addressing oil spills.

"If you put an oil-h2o mixture against that membrane, the oil will transmit spontaneously through the pores, and the water will stay behind," says Darling, director of the Center for Molecular Technology at Argonne National Laboratory. (To date, this technology has been used only on pocket-sized simulated oil spills, he says.)

Blair Brettmann, a chemical engineer and assistant professor at Georgia Tech who was non involved in the report, says the review points to heady developments for water cleanup.

"There's so many things yous tin can do with [these materials]. It's neat to come across them being applied [to this area]," she says. Brettmann says that she usually sees mussel-inspired materials used as medical adhesives in wet environments.

Brettmann and Darling agree that these materials must become more efficient earlier they're put to practical utilise.

Darling and his colleagues notice the challenges facing mussel-inspired chemistry exciting — he says that there'due south so much more about mussels' stickiness to learn. For example, their adhesion might work so well considering they collaborate as colonies and combine dissimilar amino acids to enhance stickiness.

"Oftentimes, Mother Nature is smarter than united states, [because] she'southward had billions of years to come up with solutions," Darling says. "We're withal learning from mussels."

Susie Neilson is an intern on NPR's Science Desk. Follow her on Twitter: @susieneilson.