Artificial sodium-selective ionic device based on crown-ether crystals with subnanometer pores

Tingyan Ye; Gaolei Hou; Wen Li; Chaofeng Wang; Kangyan Yi; Nannan Liu; Jian Liu; Shaoming Huang; Jun Gao

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-25597-1

Artificial sodium-selective ionic device based on crown-ether crystals with subnanometer pores

Nat Commun. 2021 Sep 1;12(1):5231. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-25597-1.

Authors

Tingyan Ye^#¹, Gaolei Hou^#², Wen Li¹, Chaofeng Wang¹, Kangyan Yi¹, Nannan Liu³, Jian Liu⁴, Shaoming Huang⁵, Jun Gao^{6

7}

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Carbon Materials of Zhejiang Province, College of Chemistry & Materials Engineering, Wenzhou University, Wenzhou, China.
² KU Leuven, Quantum Solid-State Physics section, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Leuven, Belgium.
³ Key Laboratory of Carbon Materials of Zhejiang Province, College of Chemistry & Materials Engineering, Wenzhou University, Wenzhou, China. [email protected].
⁴ College of Material Science and Engineering, Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, China.
⁵ School of Materials and Energy, Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Low-Dimensional Materials and Energy Storage Devices, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, China. [email protected].
⁶ Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao, China. [email protected].
⁷ Haiyu Chemical Engineering Co. Ltd, Dongying, China. [email protected].

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Biological sodium channels ferry sodium ions across the lipid membrane while rejecting potassium ions and other metal ions. Realizing such ion selectivity in an artificial solid-state ionic device will enable new separation technologies but remains highly challenging. In this work, we report an artificial sodium-selective ionic device, built on synthesized porous crown-ether crystals which consist of densely packed 0.26-nm-wide pores. The Na⁺ selectivity of the artificial sodium-selective ionic device reached 15 against K⁺, which is comparable to the biological counterpart, 523 against Ca^{2 +}, which is nearly two orders of magnitude higher than the biological one, and 1128 against Mg^{2 +}. The selectivity may arise from the size effect and molecular recognition effect. This work may contribute to the understanding of the structure-performance relationship of ion selective nanopores.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't