DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2611417123 ISSN: 0027-8424

Screw dislocation–mediated galaxy-mimicking superspiral assembly with amplified bio-piezoelectricity

Jiahao Zhang, Haoran Wu, Shixuan Xu, Haoye Jiang, Kang Ma, Syed A. M. Tofail, Deqing Mei, Junbai Li, Kai Tao

From the galaxies to the petals, spiral architectures are ubiquitous to confer hierarchical organizations, supporting asymmetric galactic evolutions and biological activities. Herein, inspired from nature, we report the superspiral architectures self-assembled by a minimalist amino acid. These superspirals, with spirality and geometry programmably tuned by enantiomeric excess and organization parameters, are determined to arise from the screw dislocation induced hierarchical crystallization. Notably, the spiral organization can integrate and amplify electrical polarization, yielding 17-fold enhancement in piezoelectric response contrast to random aggregates. This allows engineering of piezoelectric bioelectronics, resulting in high gain direction-selective motion sensing. Our work establishes an alternative paradigm for developing bioinspired hierarchical architectures of oriented and amplified properties, offering a self-assembling route to explore programmably modulated functional architectures for bioelectronic engineering.

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