Feb 2019: Messersmith Lab Outing- Mussel Feast at the Beach!
24 February, 2019: At team of early risers arrived at Slide Ranch in Marin County at 9am to take advantage of low tide to harvest mussels by hand off the rocks. We were rewarded by a cold rain but this did not deter us. Eventually the rain and clouds yielded to partly sunny skies. The rest of the group arrived at 11am, after which it was time to clean each mussel before cooking them on the beach. Thanks to Dirk and Dasha for all the prep work- come back again next year!
Look at these beauties!
Collected and waiting to be cleaned.
These mussels secreted new byssal threads while awaiting their demise. This is why we admire mussels so much- always working hard!
“Dynamic Covalent and Supramolecular Polymers for Fetal Membrane Repair: Physical and Pharmacologic Approaches”, to be presented by Prof. Messersmith at the Soft Matter Workshop, Barbados, May 2-8, 2026.
Recent Publications
Pal, E. Salzman, D. Ramirez, H. Chen, C.A. Perez, K. Dale, S. K. Ghosh, L. Lin, P.B. Messersmith, “Versatile solid-state medical superglue precursors of a-lipoic acid”, Journal of the American Chemical Society 2025, 147, 13377−13384. [Link]
Z Wu, Q Shi, J Wang, C Tao, S Zhang, PB Messersmith, J Shi, “Rapidly Roughening Polydopamine Nanocoating Through Polyphenol Chemistry”, Advanced Functional Materials 2025, e11171. [Link]
Cheung, P.B.Messersmith, and K.H. Lau, “Specific and non-specific interactions of fibronectin with zwitterionic peptoid brushes studied by molecular dynamics simulation”, Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics 2025, 27, 25116-25126. [Link]
K. Ghosh, S. Pal, K. Roy, W. Yue, Y. Gao, F. Xia, P. He, S. Sarkar, M. Teng, J. Park, P. Tsao, X. Li, S. Tofail, P.B. Messersmith, L. Lin, “Highly Responsive Self‐Healing and Degradable Piezoelectric Soft Machines”, Advanced Materials 2025, 37 (39), 2507859. [Link]
Oreja, D. Zaytseva-Zotova, A. Rogala, A. Barrantes, P.B. Messersmith, H. Tiainen, “Multifunctional Tannic Acid and Polyamino Acid Layer-by-Layer Coatings for Tailored Implant Surfaces”, ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering 2025, 11 (9), 5376-5388. [Link]
Nivedina A Sarma, Alexandra Grigoropoulos, Mustafa Arslan, Erika E Salzman, Panagiotis Christakopoulos, Honghai Zhang, Kelsey G DeFrates, Joakim Engström, Peter V Bonnesen, Sai Venkatesh Pingali, Ting Xu, Phillip B Messersmith, Ahmad K Omar, “Tunable Nanostructures from Inverse Surfactants”, arXiv:2511.12407, 2025. [Link]
Collected and waiting to be cleaned.
