Man-made synthetic pores mimic important features of natural pores

Man-made synthetic pores mimic important features of natural pores: The pores the scientists built are permeable to potassium ions and water, but not to other ions such as sodium and lithium ions...

To create the synthetic pores, the researchers developed a method to force donut-shaped molecules called rigid macrocycles to pile on top of one another. The scientists then stitched these stacks of molecules together using hydrogen bonding. The resulting structure was a nanotube with a pore less than a nanometer in diameter. "This nanotube can be viewed as a stack of many, many rings," said Xiao Cheng Zeng, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Ameritas University Professor of Chemistry, and one of the study's senior authors. "The rings come together through a process called self-assembly, and it's very precise. It's the first synthetic nanotube that has a very uniform diameter. It's actually a sub-nanometer tube. It's about 8.8 angstroms."