AI-designed superglue retains extreme strength under water

Extremely sticky, waterproof glues have long been a critical necessity of mankind. Now, researchers have developed two such superglues that were designed by artificial intelligence after taking inspiration from a plethora of sticky proteins found in nature (Nature 2025, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09269-4).One of the holy grails of materials science has been concocting strong and reliable waterproof glues, a quest that’s notoriously dependent upon trial and error, thus making the process luck based. Traditional glues often fail in wet environments because water disrupts the critical interactions needed for adhesion. Yet, nature is replete with organisms such as mussels, barnacles, and other marine creatures that have evolved to adhere strongly in wet, even turbulent conditions.Hailong Fan of Hokkaido University, Japan, and his team mined a comprehensive dataset of over 24,000 adhesive proteins from bacteria, eukaryotes, archaea, and viruses, spanning over 3,800 species. “Rather than mimicking one organism like the mussel, we essentially let evolution be our guide, treating nature as a massive design database,” Fan says.They found that despite their taxonomical diversity, these proteins shared characteristic amino acid sequences, especially the pairwise arrangements of amino acid functional classes involved in adhesion. Next, they created 180 novel, waterproof glues from random, free-radical copolymerization of six monomers, each representative of an amino acid functional class.Then the team measured the underwater strength of every glue, with an Escherichia derived glue emerging strongest at 147 kilopascal. Mussels, by comparison, can latch onto rocks with roughly 800 kPa of force. The researchers used this data to train machine