Graphene oxide (GO) based membranes have been widely applied in molecular separation based on the size exclusion effect of the nanochannels formed by stacked GO sheets. However, it’s still a challenge to prepare a freestanding GO-based membrane with high mechanical strength and structural stability which is prerequisite for separation application in aqueous solution. Here, a freestanding composite membrane based on bacterial cellulose (BC) and GO is designed and prepared. BC network provides a porous skeleton to spread GO sheets and uniformly incorporates into the GO layers, which endows the BC + GO composite membrane with well water-stability, excellent tensile strength, as well as improved toughness, guaranteeing its separation applicability in water environment. The resulting BC + GO membrane exhibits obviously discrepant permeation properties for different inorganic/organic ions with different size, and in particular, it can quickly separate ions in nano-scale from angstrom-scale. Therefore, this novel composite membrane is considered to be a promising candidate in the applications of water purification, food industry, biomedicine, and pharmaceutical and fuel separation.

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A novel chiral microemulsion, which involved the use of chiral alcohols as cosurfactants, was demonstrated for the enantiomeric separation of a number of pharmaceutical drugs in microemulsion electrokinetic chromatography (MEEKC). The chiral alcohols investigated were optically active 2-alkanols, with the alkyl chain length having carbon number ranging from 4 to 7. The data indicated that, except for R-(-)-2-butanol, the use of R-(-)-2-pentanol, R-(-)-2-hexanol or R-(-)-2-heptanol as the chiral cosurfactant resulted in the baseline or partial resolution of most of the test solutes, i.e., (+/-)-norephedrine, (+/-)-ephedrine, DL-nadolol, and DL-propranolol. In addition to the chain length of the chiral 2-alkanols, the effects of other experimental conditions, such as the concentration and chirality of the 2-alkanols, as well as the pH of the run buffer and the oil phase of the microemulsion, on the enantiomeric separation of the test solutes were also investigated. An interesting finding was that the water-immiscible organic solvent (oil core) within the microemulsion droplets appeared to play an important role in the chiral separation mechanism. Also, the importance of hydrogen bonding between the test solutes ((+/-)-ephedrine and related compounds) and the chiral microemulsion was demonstrated, as it was not possible to resolve a pair of enantiomers which lacked a beta-amino proton (i.e., (+/-)-N-methyl ephedrine) under optimized run buffer conditions (e.g., 5.0% R-(-)-2-hexanol, 0.8% n-octane, and 3.5% SDS in 90.7% borate buffer at pH 9.2).