Collaborative Research: Plant-based Pathogen Filters

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Viral contamination of drinking water can cause disease. Although such waterborne diseases pose significant public health threats, current filtration technologies suitable for virus removal have high cost and energy requirements. This prevents their widespread use and has led to the need for less expensive and sustainable alternatives for disinfecting drinking water. The goal of this project is to use computational biology tools to discover plant-based peptides that can trap viruses to create low-cost and energy-efficient drinking water filters. The potential for scale up will be assessed to understand the impacts of common water constituents on virus-protein interactions to improve sustainable and effective filter operation. Creation of a large database of plant peptides will be broadly informative to other scientific disciplines and easily accessible via internet resource to be developed as part of this project. Successful development of plant-based water biofilters will have a range of potential applications including the replacement of aging infrastructure and use in disaster relief situations. More broadly, low cost filters have significant potential to decrease waterborne disease deaths worldwide through improved access to clean drinking water. Water contamination with human enteric viruses is one of the leading causes of acute diarrhea hospitalization and fatalities worldwide. Removal of these viruses can be achieved through filtration and other water treatment technologies. Although filtration has been one of the most widely used techniques for drinking water treatment, there has been comparatively little innovation in filtration in recent decades. The goal of this project is to develop sustainable, scalable filters functionalized with sustainable plant material known as antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). Specific objectives designed to achieve the project goal focus on understanding the fundamental biomolecular and physicochemical interactions to: 1) Computationally identify plant-derived AMPs that preferentially bind viral capsid proteins for use in plant-based pathogen filters; 2) Validate chosen AMPs using lab removal tests with the enteric viruses Adenovirus 2, Rotavirus OSU strain, and Tulane virus (a surrogate for human norovirus); 3) Identify readily available substrates and feasible filter configurations that can be tailored to a range of applications; and 4) Quantify interactions and interferences between filter surfaces, viruses, and water matrix components to enable translation to the field scale. Successful completion of these research objectives will lead to the development of a data-driven framework for creating and evaluating AMP-based materials. Further, low cost-effective plant-based pathogen filters have the potential to reduce waterborne disease worldwide through widespread adoption of the technology.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.