In this contribution, we report the application of time domain dielectric spectroscopy from 500 kHz to 1 GHz and differential scanning calorimetry to bacteriorhodopsin containing purple membrane films. The results of these measurements unexpectedly show that the oriented purple membrane has a unique liquid-crystal-like ferroelectric behavior. The dielectric behavior can be considered as soft mode relaxation processes in ferro-electric liquid crystals near smectic-C*−smectic-A phase transition. Such a phenomenon has not been previously observed in biological systems.
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Ermolina et al. (2001) studied this question.
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