NSF Award
1710466
To support continued economic growth and maintenance of human health, it is vital to have access to sufficient quantities of clean water. However, we are increasingly unable to meet this need, and water scarcity is now considered one of the most serious global challenges of this century. A key problem is the lack of low-cost and high-efficiency technologies for water purification. With support from the Macromolecular, Supramolecular and Nanochemistry Program of the NSF Chemistry Division, Drs. Vojislava Pophristic and Zhiwei Liu at the University of the Sciences are designing highly permeable and selective water channels that will significantly improve water filtration by allowing the passage of water, while blocking salts and other impurities. The channels are cylindrical hollow helices that are formed by assembly of specific chemical building blocks. The group first designs the channel on the computer by creating and optimizing the building block sequences. The promising candidates are then made in the laboratory and tested by experiments. This project is a training ground for students at a science-focused university, a community college and one of the nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU).<br/><br/>The project builds upon the group's development of computational approaches for accurate structure and dynamics prediction of arylamide foldamers. The arylamide scaffolds form stable single or duplex helices of application-appropriate lengths and inner cavity dimensions. The modularity and tunability of arylamide foldamers make them excellent candidates for the design of water transport channels by mimicking structural characteristics of aquaporins. The group designs water channels by establishing sequence-structure-function relationship using rational and combinatorial sequence generation and molecular dynamics simulations, followed by optimization for selectivity. The project includes an international collaboration with Dr. Ivan Huc, who experimentally verifies computationally obtained structures and measures water/ion/proton conductivities. An important aspect to this project is that it helps us understand naturally occurring filtration processes, such as selective water transport by aquaporins, which play a critical role in human health.
