A Selective Membrane Inspired by Aquaporin Channels Filters and Purifies Water

Innovation: Industry

Aquaporin

2015

Image: Jong Marshes / Unsplash / CC BY SA - Creative Commons Attribution + ShareAlike

Detoxification/Purification of Air/Water/Waste

Ecosystems must be effective at cleaning air, water, and waste because so much of what is in the air, water, and waste is valuable to organisms as resources. In contrast to functions that detoxify or purify at the organism level, this is at a larger scale. To be effective at the ecosystem level, it isn’t the individual efforts of a few organisms that detoxifies and purifies, but the actions of a wide diversity of organisms each contributing to the whole. For example, as water flows through an ecosystem, either aboveground or in the soil, a diversity of organisms take different actions to slow it down, capture excess nutrients from it, and break down harmful chemicals into more benign ones.

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Capture, Absorb, or Filter Chemical Entities

Living systems often require chemical elements and chemical compounds, including complex sugars, proteins, and odor-making compounds, to perform critical activities. These compounds exist in various states–solid, liquid, and gas–and are ubiquitous in soil, water, and air. This requires that living systems not only have ways to capture, absorb, or filter them, but also ways to differentiate among them, selecting those that are valuable or harmful. For example, mangrove trees live with their roots in salty water and sediments. Various mangrove species have different strategies for removing salt from the water they take in so that their tissues can use the fresh water.

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Patents

Aquaporin Inside water filter membranes from Aquaporin improve water treatment and re-use for a wide range of industries.

Benefits

Sustainable
Reduced cost
Improved water treatment and re-use

Applications

Industrial wastewater treatment
Commercial and residential buildings

UN Sustainable Development Goals Addressed

Goal 3: Good Health & Wellbeing
Goal 6: Clean Water & Sanitation

The Challenge

Water is essential for human survival, and access to clean drinking water is critical for good health. Contaminated drinking water can cause numerous health concerns, including exposure to viruses. Traditional water filtration membranes are mostly dense polymeric films that require advanced chemistry to function properly.

Innovation Details

Aquaporin Inside® water filter membranes are biomimetic membranes that mimic the function of aquaporin channels. They treat and purify water by selectively allowing water to enter while filtering out chemicals and other toxins.

Biological Model

Aquaporins are a family of channel proteins that are found in all kingdoms of life. Aquaporins allow water molecules to pass across cell membranes while excluding most other molecules. This allows cells to regulate how much water is moving in and out of them.

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