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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Aquaporins are proteins that serve as water channels to regulate the flow of water across biological cell membranes. They also remove excess salt and impurities in the body, and it is this aspect that has led to much interest in recent years in how to mimic the biochemical processes of aquaporins potentially for water desalination systems.

An international team of researchers co-led by Georges Belfort has discovered water, in the form of "water wires," contained in another molecule -- the imidazole -- a nitrogen-based organic compound that could be used as a potential building block for artificial aquaporins. The findings were recently published in Science Advances by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Belfort is Institute Professor and professor of chemical and biological engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Belfort's colleague, Mihail Barboiu, a research leader at the European Membranes Institute (EMI) in France, has synthesized and studied the dynamics of a ring structure of the imidazole embedded in a supported lipid bilayer (i.e., in a synthetic model of a biological membrane surrounding a cell). EMI operates under the auspices of several organizations, including France's National Center for Scientific Research (abbreviated CNRS in French).

X-ray studies by Barboiu and dynamic computer simulations by CNRS researcher Marc Baaden show that the imidazole's ring structure makes the molecule an ideal candidate to learn about how artificial aquaporins could be developed. In theory, assembled imidazole molecules act like an aquaporin by allowing water molecules to enter and possibly flow through the center of the ring structure while keeping out other molecules.

Still, there was no direct proof that water existed inside the imidazole water channel. To find out, Barboiu enlisted the help of Belfort and Poul Petersen, assistant professor of chemistry at Cornell University.

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