Glucose suppresses biological ferroelectricity in aortic elastin
Yuanming Liu, Yunjie Wang, Ming-Jay Chow, Nataly Q. Chen, Feiyue Ma, Yanhang Zhang, and Jiangyu Li
Accepted
Elastin is an intriguing extracellular matrix protein present in all connective tissues of vertebrates, rendering essential elasticity to connective tissues subjected to repeated physiological stresses. Using piezoresponse force microscopy, we show that the polarity of aortic elastin is switchable by an electrical field, which may be associated with the recently discovered biological ferroelectricity in aorta. More interestingly, it is discovered that the switching in aortic elastin is largely suppressed by glucose treatment, which appears to freeze the internal asymmetric polar structures of elastin, making it much harder to switch or suppressing the switching completely. Such loss of ferroelectricity could have important physiological and pathological implications from aging to arteriosclerosis that are closely related to glycation of elastin. *