Research and innovation

The mystery of the mussel

Issued: Mon, 04 Apr 2011 16:17:00 BST

The humble mussel seems an unlikely starting point for a revolutionary collaborative research project, but that's exactly what it provided for a group of scientists from the Schools of Geographical & Earth Sciences, Engineering and Chemistry.

mussels Mussels hold a scientific mystery within the structure of their shells. They are made from two layers of calcium carbonate with a rich mixture of proteins. The two layers, although fundamentally different in structure, are both made of calcium carbonate, are very light and strong, and are therefore of interest to materials scientists.

Not only this, but the shell is osteo-inductive, which means that it is useful to cell engineers who are looking to target bone-wasting diseases by creating new bone from stem cells. 

At the moment no one knows how the mussels synthesise such specialist compounds, but Professor of Biomineralisation Maggie Cusack is collaborating with Dr Huabing Yin, Dr Nikolaj Gadegaard and Dr Phil Dobson of Engineering using a novel lab-on-a-chip technique that she hopes will help shed light on the mystery.

'The actual chip contains tiny little channels, about 50 microns wide, and that's where the reactions take place. I'm supervising a PhD student, Bozhi Ji, who is trying to develop ways of controlling the flow of the reagents that are involved in crystal formation, so that he can monitor what each of the variants in the protein does,' says Professor Cusack.

'The great thing about this lab-on-a-chip technology is that it's so simple but you can control all the parameters; you can control the protein concentration flow-rate, the pH, the temperature, so you know exactly what the conditions were when that crystal formed, and it's really fast: the crystals are grown in minutes.'

Coming from a life sciences background, Bozhi Ji started the project with a good knowledge of how to extract and purify proteins, but he did have to stretch his skills to learn about engineering and nano-engineering, so that he could fabricate the lab-on-a-chip approaches.

'This is a true collaborative project,' says Professor Cusack. 'Bozhi Ji is also supervised by Dr Andy Freer in Chemistry and three other supervisors in Engineering, each of them bringing in a different piece of the puzzle to the problem. It's a challenging project but brilliant that a student can come from life sciences with good skills base and expand it from there.'

Assessing the effects of CO2

Professor Cusack has recently received funding from the Leverhulme Trust to examine the potential effects of increased CO2 on our ocean-life. Many marine biominerals are carbonate based and current projections suggest that ocean acidification caused by increased levels of CO2 in our atmosphere could catastrophically limit the ability of these organisms to function, leading to major disruption of our undersea eco-system.

Working with Dr Vernon Phoenix and Dr Nick Kamenos, all from the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences the scientists hope to determine how mussels might respond to ocean acidification.

Professor Cusack said 'In living systems, mineral structures have organic as well as inorganic components and it is essential that we understand how both components respond to acidification’.

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