Single Molecule Evidence for the Adaptive Binding of DOPA to Different Wet Surfaces

3,4-Dihydroxyphenylalanine (DOPA) is the noncanonical amino acid widely found in mussel holdfast proteins, which is proposed to be responsible for their strong wet adhesion. This feature has also inspired the successful development of a range of DOPA-containing synthetic polymers for wet adhesions and surface coating. Despite the increasing applications of DOPA in material science, the underlying mechanism of DOPA–wet surface interactions remains unclear. In this work, we studied DOPA–surface interactions one bond at a time using atomic force microscope (AFM) based single molecule force spectroscopy. With our recently developed “multiple fishhook” protocol, we were able to perform high-throughput quantification of the binding strength of DOPA to various types of surfaces for the first time. We found that the dissociation forces between DOPA and nine different types of organic and inorganic surfaces are all in the range of 60–90 pN at a pulling speed of 1000 nm s^–1, suggesting the strong and versatile binding capability of DOPA to different types of surfaces. Moreover, by constructing the free energy landscape for the rupture events, we revealed several distinct binding modes between DOPA and different surfaces, which are directly related to the chemistry nature of the surfaces. These results explain the molecular origin of the versatile binding ability of DOPA. Moreover, we could quantitatively predict the relationship between DOPA contents and the binding strength based on the measured rupture kinetics. These serve as the bases for the quantitative prediction of the relationship between DOPA contents and adhesion strength to different wet surfaces, which is important for the design of novel DOPA based materials