ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Ferroelectric switching of elastin.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 91 citations in OpenAlex.
- Exploring the piezoelectric phenomenon: From polymers to human tissues and advanced applications in tissue engineering.Bioactive materials · 2026Review
- Design and Manufacturing of Piezoelectric Biomaterials for Bioelectronics and Biomedical Applications.Chemical reviews · 2025Review
- Open Challenges and Opportunities in Piezoelectricity for Tissue Regeneration.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Review
- Ferroelectric and Non-Linear Optical Nanofibers by Electrospinning: From Inorganics to Molecular Crystals.Nanomaterials (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Advanced Materials for Energy Harvesting and Soft Robotics: Emerging Frontiers to Enhance Piezoelectric Performance and Functionality.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2024Review
- Biodielectrics: old wine in a new bottle?Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2024Review
- Piezoelectricity of BiNanomaterials (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Natural Piezoelectric Biomaterials: A Biocompatible and Sustainable Building Block for Biomedical Devices.ACS nano · 2022Review
- Manipulation of coacervate droplets with an electric field.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Piezoelectric Signals in Vascularized Bone Regeneration.Biomolecules · 2021Review
- Powering Implantable and Ingestible Electronics.Advanced functional materials · 2021Article
- The intrinsic piezoelectric properties of materials - a review with a focus on biological materials.RSC advances · 2021Review
- The strain-generated electrical potential in cartilaginous tissues: a role for piezoelectricity.Biophysical reviews · 2021Review
- Progress in lead-free piezoelectric nanofiller materials and related composite nanogenerator devices.Nanoscale advances · 2020Review
- Advancing Versatile Ferroelectric Materials Toward Biomedical Applications.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2020Review
- Organic enantiomeric high-Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Mapping intrinsic electromechanical responses at the nanoscale via sequential excitation scanning probe microscopy empowered by deep data.National science review · 2019Article
- Correlation between polar surface area and bioferroelectricity in DNA and RNA nucleobases.The European physical journal. E, Soft matter · 2018Article
- Control of piezoelectricity in amino acids by supramolecular packing.Nature materials · 2018Article
- The Coupled Bio-Chemo-Electro-Mechanical Behavior of Glucose Exposed Arterial Elastin.Journal of physics D: Applied physics · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
14 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Ferroelectricity has long been speculated to have important biological functions, although its very existence in biology has never been firmly established. Here, we present compelling evidence that elastin, the key ECM protein found in connective tissues, is ferroelectric, and we elucidate the molecular mechanism of its switching. Nanoscale piezoresponse force microscopy and macroscopic pyroelectric measurements both show that elastin retains ferroelectricity at 473 K, with polarization on the order of 1 μC/cm(2), whereas coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations predict similar polarization with a Curie temperature of 580 K, which is higher than most synthetic molecular ferroelectrics. The polarization of elastin is found to be intrinsic in tropoelastin at the monomer level, analogous to the unit cell level polarization in classical perovskite ferroelectrics, and it switches via thermally activated cooperative rotation of dipoles. Our study sheds light onto a long-standing question on ferroelectric switching in biology and establishes ferroelectricity as an important biophysical property of proteins. This is a critical first step toward resolving its physiological significance and pathological implications.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.