Aquaporin Biomimetic Membrane for Energy Conservative Water Desalination
One of the important issues affecting people around the globe is inadequate access to clean and safe water. Problems with water are expected to increase in coming decades at an alarming rate, causing water scarcity around the world even in water rich areas. To address the problems a novel approach is needed for water purification at low energy consumption, high purity and at the same time the chemical treatment and waste production should be minimized. Here we present a nature inspired biomimetic water filter containing aquaporin protein. Aquaporin is the most efficient water channel in nature due to its high water selectivity and permeability. In spite of its merits, the manufactural difficulties of aquaporin embedded membranes as well as their fragility preclude their industrial applications. To overcome these problems, by crosslinking lipid molecules, we propose a novel method that stabilizes aquaporin embedded membranes using electrostatic interactions and alternative coating methods. Furthermore, surface morphological analysis show that the proteoliposomes were successfully immobilized on the substrate and retain their structure. The performance of this aquaporin biomimetic membrane was tested for a forward osmosis (FO) based water purification system.