Salt Triggers the Simple Coacervation of an Underwater Adhesive When Cations Meet Aromatic π Electrons in Seawater
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adhesive systems in many marine organisms are postulated to form complex coacervates (liquid-liquid phase separation) through a process involving oppositely charged polyelectrolytes. Despite this ubiquitous speculation, most well-characterized mussel adhesive proteins are cationic and polyphenolic, and the pursuit of the negatively charged proteins required for bulk complex coacervation formation internally remains elusive. In this study, we provide a clue for unraveling this paradox by showing the bulky fluid/fluid separation of a single cationic recombinant mussel foot protein, rmfp-1, with no additional anionic proteins or artificial molecules, that is triggered by a strong cation-π interaction in natural seawater conditions. With the similar condition of salt concentration at seawater level (>0.7 M), the electrostatic repulsion between positively charged residues of mfp-1 is screened significantly, whereas the strong cation-π interaction remains unaffected, which leads to the macroscopic phase separation (i.e., bulky coacervate formation). The single polyelectrolyte coacervate shows interesting mechanical properties including low friction, which facilitates the secretion process of the mussel. Our findings reveal that the cation-π interaction modulated by salt is a key mechanism in the mussel adhesion process, providing new insights into the basic understanding of wet adhesion, self-assembly processes, and biological phenomena that are mediated by strong short-range attractive forces in water.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it