RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 The glue produced by Drosophila melanogaster for pupa adhesion is universal JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 2019.12.19.882761 DO 10.1101/2019.12.19.882761 A1 Flora Borne A1 Alexander Kovalev A1 Stanislav Gorb A1 Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo YR 2020 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/02/25/2019.12.19.882761.abstract AB Insects produce a variety of adhesives for diverse functions such as locomotion, mating, egg or pupal anchorage to substrates. Although they are important for the biology of organisms and potentially represent a great resource for developing new materials, insect adhesives have been little studied so far. Here, we examined the adhesive properties of the larval glue of D. melanogaster. This glue is made of glycosylated proteins and allows the animal to adhere to a substrate during metamorphosis. We designed an adhesion test to measure the pull-off force required to detach a pupa from a substrate and to evaluate the contact area covered by the glue. We found that the pupa adheres with similar forces to a variety of substrates (with distinct roughness, hydrophilic and charge properties). We obtained an average pull-off force of 217 mN, corresponding to 15 500 times the weight of a pupa and adhesion strength of 137-244 kPa. Surprisingly, the pull-off forces did not depend on the contact area. Our study paves the way for a genetic dissection of the components of Drosophila melanogaster glue that confer its particular adhesive properties.SUMMARY STATEMENT We designed an adhesion test to measure the pull-off force required to detach drosophila pupae and found that Drosophila glue adheres similarly to various substrates of different chemical properties.PLLPoly-L-LysinePLL-PEGPoly-L-Lysine-Polyethyl glycolSEMScanning Electron Microscopy