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Show 14 Peter Millson college of engineering There is a need for surgical glue that can polymerize under wet conditions. Currently nothing of this sort exists, leaving surgeons with few options when fixing bone fragments or installing artificial joints. Research into this subject has lead to attempts to make synthetic glues based on those found in nature. One such animal, the sandcastle worm, has a perfect template for a potential medical adhesive. It sets quickly under water and once set it's quite strong. We developed a method for stimulating the secretion of this glue. A one-half to one-second pulse from a 9V electrical source was applied directly to the animal's adhesive gland, causing a viscous white substance to evolve from the building organ. (See fig. 1) The secre-tion was captured with a pipette and placed in a 1ml centrifuge tube. The secretion was characterized with SDS-PAGE gels and tandem mass spectrometry. The MSMS results returned contaminated so research continues in characterizing the proteins in the secretion. FTIR analysis is being used to study the kinetics of the glue's polymerization, but at the time of print the results are too rough to include. Further characteriza-tion of the proteins in the stimulated secretion is needed to more fully understand the mechanism of the glue in the worm's natural environment, which will in turn will lead to a more successful synthetic medical adhesive. Fig. 1. Image taken from video of stimulation under an Olympus FV1000 confocal microscope. (1) Fluo-rescent glue secreting from (2) the building organ. The building organ is the horseshoe shaped structure surrounding the secreted glue. SECRETORY STIMULATION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF GLUE FROM PHRAGMATOPOMA CALIFORNICA Peter Millson (Russell Stewart) Department of Bioengineering University of Utah UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH ABSTRACTS Russell Stewart |