Outperforming nature's membranes

摘要: Industrial chemical reactions or biosynthetic processes rarely yield pure products, and the additional separation steps typically required often make up largest part of product cost. Membrane separations are considered among most efficient methods, deriving inspiration from membranes in living cells. Intriguingly, on page 1347 this issue, Karan et al. ( 1 ) show that synthetic may get close to eventually outperform their soft biological counterparts many aspects. They targeted rapidly developing field organic solvent nanofiltration (OSN) 2 ). Such membrane filtration nonaqueous solutions help synthesis 3 more environmentally friendly by separating recycling solvents, reactants, catalysts.