ArticleJournal of the American Chemical Society2023
Peculiar Phosphonate Modifications of Velvet Worm Slime Revealed by Advanced Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and Mass Spectrometry.
Article in Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- Conserved leucine-rich repeat proteins in the adhesive projectile slime of velvet worms.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
14 authors at 7 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Nature is rich with examples of highly specialized biological materials produced by organisms for functions, including defense, hunting, and protection. Along these lines, velvet worms (Onychophora) expel a protein-based slime used for hunting and defense that upon shearing and dehydration forms fibers as stiff as thermoplastics. These fibers can dissolve back into their precursor proteins in water, after which they can be drawn into new fibers, providing biological inspiration to design recyclable materials. Elevated phosphorus content in velvet worm slime was previously observed and putatively ascribed to protein phosphorylation. Here, we show instead that phosphorus is primarily present as phosphonate moieties in the slime of distantly related velvet worm species. Using high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), natural abundance dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP), and mass spectrometry (MS), we demonstrate that 2-aminoethyl phosphonate (2-AEP) is associated with glycans linked to large slime proteins, while transcriptomic analyses confirm the expression of 2-AEP synthesizing enzymes in slime glands. The evolutionary conservation of this rare protein modification suggests an essential functional role of phosphonates in velvet worm slime and should stimulate further study of the function of this unusual chemical modification in nature.
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