Piezoelectricity in ribonucleosides and deoxynucleosides microcrystals via piezoresponse force microscopy

In this work we used piezoresponse force microscopy methods to find out that several nucleobases are not only piezoelectric but also ferroelectric. The pronounced ferroelectricity was confirmed by the visualisation of as-grown and artificially created domains, with pronounced hysteresis (measured locally and in pressed samples). The knowledge of the local electromechanical properties of nucleic acids might be helpful for developing biomedical devices to obtain genetic information from DNA sequences and for a complete physicochemical description of the elementary building blocks of living forms.