The marine mussel secreted adhesive proteins and could bind strongly to all kinds of surfaces. Studies indicated that there was an unusual amino acid 3,4-dihydroxy-Lphenylanine (DOPA). DOPA could be oxidized to DOPA-quinone easily, which had a superior ability to on surface directly. The technology of electrolyzing seawater was employed to generate HOCl solution to react with DOPA-quinone and form DOPA-quinone chlorides (DOPA-quinone-Cl) to hinder the adhesion. However, the detailed hinder-mechanism remained unknown to be fully explained. Herein, using quantum chemical density functional theory methods, we have systematically studied three kinds of adsorption for DOPA-quinone and DOPA-quinone-Cl on Cu (1 0 0) surface: hydroxyl oxygen-side vertical, carbonyl oxygen-side vertical, amino N-terminal vertical adsorptions and carried out geometry optimization and energy calculation. The results showed that two molecules could absorb on the Cu (1 0 0) through hydroxyl oxygen-side vertical adsorption, while the other two kinds of adsorption could not form an effective adsorption. Calculations of adsorption energy for hydroxyl oxygen-side vertical adsorption indicated that: after HOCl modification, adsorption energy decreased from -247.2310 kJ/mol to -177.0579 kJ/mol for DOPA-quinone and DOPA-quinone-Cl; and the Mulliken Charges Populations showed that the electrons transferred from surface to DOPA-quinone-Cl was less than that to DOPA-quinone, namely, the fewer the number of electrons transferred, the weaker interaction between molecular and surface. After the theoretical calculation, we found that the anti-foul goal had been achieved by electrolysis of seawater to generate HOCl to modify DOPA-quinone, which led to the reduction of adsorption energy and transferred electrons. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.