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How do snails manage to crawl, stick, and protect themselves using the same slime? Researchers show that they specifically adapt its chemical composition depending on the task at hand.
Snails are particularly active after a rain shower. Even on the Max Planck Campus in Potsdam-Golm, common brown-lipped snails (Cepaea nemoralis) leave behind their shiny trails of mucus. Researchers from the “Biomaterials” department recognized the slime as a promising natural material. This is because the snail does not produce just one type of slime, but can vary it as needed so that it becomes liquid, solid, sticky, or slippery.
For the research team, snail mucus thus became the subject of a materials science analysis: How does the snail manage to produce completely different material properties using the same basic building blocks? The researchers provide the answer in a study that has now been published in the journal Science. In it, they demonstrate for the first time in detail the biochemical recipes the banded snail uses to tailor its mucus specifically to different tasks.
“Snail mucus may seem unremarkable at first glance, but it is an incredibly versatile material,” says Dr. Franziska Jehle, the study’s corresponding author. “The fact that the snail can specifically alter the properties of its mucus using the same basic building blocks is what makes it so fascinating for research.”
The Building Blocks of Snail Mucus
To understand how nature produces this diversity of materials, the researchers analyzed five different types of mucus. They examined mucus that enables locomotion, acts as a strong adhesive on surfaces, protects the animal from dehydration, seals the shell during prolonged periods of rest, and serves as a defense mechanism.
They found that the snail consistently uses the same components for the different types of mucus, mixing them in varying proportions. The chemical building blocks are proteins – primarily collagen – and calcium.
The researchers were surprised to identify collagen VI as a key component of the mucus. This is because the protein is primarily known for its structural role in human skin, bones, and joints. Together with disordered calcium carbonate – which the snail stores in its glandular tissue and releases along with the mucus as needed – the proportion of collagen VI plays a decisive role in controlling the properties of the various mucus types. Apparently, the snail uses the total amount of proteins and the proportion of collagen VI to alter how dense the protein network in the mucus is. This has a direct effect on the mechanical properties: the denser the protein network, the tougher the mucus. Calcium, in its ionic form, serves either to cross-link the mucus or, as calcite, to reinforce the material.
Learning from Nature
“The findings of this study extend far beyond the biology of the snail,” says Prof. Peter Fratzl, co-author of the study and director at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces. “Natural materials achieve an enormous variety of functions with just a few building blocks. Understanding the principles behind this is of great importance for the development of sustainable materials.”
Following the model of snail mucus, for example, it may be possible to produce environmentally friendly adhesives, functional coatings and materials for medical applications.
Dr. Franziska Jehle
Groupleader
Biomaterials
Mucus-based Materials
+49 331 567-9630
franziska.jehle@mpikg.mpg.de
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Peter Fratzl
Director
Biomaterials
+49 331 567-9401
+49 331 567-9402
gabbe@mpikg.mpg.de
Mariella Gabler, Emeline Raguin, Ernesto Scoppola, Barbara Steigenberger, Assa Yeroslaviz, Peter Werner, Peter Fratzl, Franziska Jehle. Calcium tunes snail mucus–based materials to multiple functions. Science 393 (6811), pp. 596 - 600 (2026).
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adx7367
An ordinary brown-lipped snail produces an astonishing variety of mucus types using just one molecul ...
Copyright: Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces
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