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Effective devices for providing safe drinking water are urgently needed to reduce the global burden of waterborne disease. A recent paper in PLoS ONE shows that plant xylem from the sapwood of coniferous trees – a readily available, inexpensive, biodegradable, and disposable material – can remove bacteria from water by simple pressure-driven filtration. Approximately 3 cm3 of sapwood can filter water at the rate of several liters per day, sufficient to meet the clean drinking water needs of one person. The results demonstrate the potential of plant xylem to address the need for pathogen-free drinking water in developing countries and resource-limited settings.
Since angiosperms (flowering plants, including hardwood trees) have larger xylem vessels that are more effective at conducting sap, xylem tissue constitutes a smaller fraction of the cross-section area of their trunks or branches, which is not ideal in the context of filtration. The long length of their xylem vessels also implies that a large thickness (centimeters to meters) of xylem tissue will be required to achieve any filtration effect at all – filters that are thinner than the average vessel length will just allow water to flow through the vessels without filtering it through pit membranes. In contrast, gymnosperms (conifers, including softwood trees) have short tracheids that would force water to flow through pit membranes even for small thicknesses (<1 cm) of xylem tissue. Since tracheids have smaller diameters and are shorter, they offer higher resistance to flow, but typically a greater fraction of the stem cross-section area is devoted to conducting xylem tissue. For example, in the pine branch used in this study, fluid-conducting xylem constitutes the majority of the cross-section. This reasoning leads the authors to the conclusion that in general the xylem tissue of coniferous trees – i.e. the sapwood – is likely to be the most suitable xylem tissue for construction of a water filtration device, at least for filtration of bacteria, protozoa, and other pathogens on the micron or larger scale.
William Salter
Danielle Marias
