Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories have found that glycine, the simplest building block of proteins, has ferroelectric properties. Ferroelectrics are materials that reversibly change their polarization under an external electric field. This property of the ferroelectric materials is significant in building memory devices. This discovery, as the researchers say, "paves way to a novel classes of bioelectronic logic and memory devices".
Although there is a long way to go before such molecules are used in practice, it is quite possible that we will be witnessing an era of bioelectronics in the years ahead.
*image adopted from here
