Water in other substances and extracting it.

[wasteofo2]

Before I can even pose a question, I need to know whether or not the water is chemically bonded to the other substances in things like juices and fruit.

If it is chemically bonded, it the separation of water from these molecules something done by digestive enzymes, or a process which uses ATP?

 

[FZ+]

What do you mean "chemically bonded"?

I think it is usually a case of suspension, or solution. Osmosis and filtration is enough.

 

[wasteofo2]

I'm pretty much a layman, so I probabally used bad terminology.

I meant, essentially, in something like orange juice, is it just water with other things suspended in it, or does the water form any sort of bond which would take any expendature of ATP to separate the water from whatever substance it might be bound with.

 

[Monique]

Water is very good at forming Hydrogen bonds with polar substances, but these are non-covalent interactions. The best way to extract the water would probably be destillation.

 

[Another God]

I think the answer you are looking for is that everything is Desolved into water...just like salt. Orange juice for instance, just happens to be water with a lot of stuff in it which happens to be specific for oranges. Distillation is simply a process of turning the water into gas so that it leaves all of the dissolved substances behind as the gas floats away. The steam is then cooled back down to liquid temperature again into a container that is separate from the first.

this is the most basic purification technique available (although it doesn't really purify. The steam can carry some stuff along with it. It will get rid of most of it though)

And yes, any aqueous thing is water with solutes in it. Milk, Juice, Acid, Detergent, blood etc included.

I think alcohol is one of the rare exceptions, and then other obvious liquids like mercury..and there are a few more.

 

[Nereid]

minerals

wasteofo2, would you mind clarifying a bit further? I read your initial question quite differently: is water (H₂O) bound chemically to other substances?
And the answer is yes!

In geology, there are a lot of mineral pairs which differ only in that one has 'water' in it and the other doesn't. For example, anhydrite (calcium sulphate) and gypsum (hydrated calcium sulphate)

 

[nautica]

I don't believe what he is talking about is a chemical bond. They are "intermolecular forces". In this case Hydrogen bonding, which is not an actual bond, in fact it is only 5% as strong as a covalent bond. It would, also, have some dipole-dipole and london (dispersion) forces,but these would be insignificant. I believe Monique was correct in mentioning distillation or in some cases vacuum filtration would even work.

Nautica

 

[eagleone]

Originally posted by Monique
Water is very good at forming Hydrogen bonds with polar substances, but these are non-covalent interactions.

Not really non-covalent interactions!
Hydrogen bond is about 10% covalent bond, formed by electrons delocalized from sigma bond! A credit to this discovery goes to L. Pauling, and some to humble me :) (Not knowing for his work), of course nothing without HUP.

Extracting the water ? Usually you extract something out of water, but there’s no real difference, in both cases you get water and something;). Most common way is working with polar and non-polar solvent (e.g. using proper hydrophobic solvent you’ll get separated water from more hydrophobic molecules in two phases, and similar) …

 

[Monique]

Originally posted by eagleone
Not really non-covalent interactions!
Hydrogen bond is about 10% covalent bond, formed by electrons delocalized from sigma bond! A credit to this discovery goes to L. Pauling, and some to humble me :) (Not knowing for his work), of course nothing without HUP.

Some to you? Explain more.. :)

Most common way is working with polar and non-polar solvent (e.g. using proper hydrophobic solvent you’ll get separated water from more hydrophobic molecules in two phases, and similar) … [/B]

Um, yes, but water is extremely good is solvating substances, there will be a lot of stuff in it..

For a bottle of orange juice, I'd centrifuge the sample, boil the supernatant, cool the steam, this will already be relatively pure, you can make it purer by restricting the boiling temperature at which you condensate the gas. But it greatly depends on the scale you want to do it at.. I wouldn't recommend using a boiler to purify water for city supply..

You can use reactive carbon to pull out contaminants or filter it through piles of sand (dunes), but I don't think the purification process was asked for in your inquiry :P

 

[Monique]

Actually an interesting thing I'd like to mention not really related, but a little it is.. it is about the three-dimensional structure of bacterial K+ ion leak channel and why they conduct K+ better than Na+ (while Na+ is smaller).

size of K+ 0.133 nm (is conducted 10,000-fold better)
size of Na+ 0.095 nm

Turns out that for a K+ ion to enter the filter, it must lose almost all of its bound water molecules and interact instead with carbonyl oxygens lining the selectivity filter.

So why you ask, can't the smaller Na+ pass through more freely?

Well, the carbonyl oxygens are too far away from the smaller Na+ ion to compensate for the energy expense associated with the loss of water molecules, required for its entry :)

Smart people those chemists to figure that out :)

 

[wasteofo2]

I'm not good at asking questions it would seem.

What I wanted to know is: When you drink something, like orange juice, milk, soda etc. by what means, in the body, is the water separated from the other things in it which made the solution you drank. Also, does the separation of water from everything else take the expendature of ATP?

 

[Another God]

Since the water isn;t really attached to the substance, it is never 'separated' physically. Remember that we are essentially all water...with stuff in it...

If we drink or eat something with water in it, the water is the fluid upon which that subjstance is moved around in. But the substance itself is the only thing that is reacted with or used etc, while the water is present so it can be used... Everything in biology happens in an aqueous environment.

 

[Monique]

Maybe you are interested in how the bowel absorbes liquids, since in sickness we get diarrea? Or how kidney's work maybe too?

 

[wasteofo2]

I was actually interested in whether or not ATP was used to get water from things like juice to determine if it wasmore beneficial to get the water for respiration from pure water.

 

[Monique]

Then why didn't you say so in your first post

 

[Chemicalsuperfreak]

Originally posted by wasteofo2
I'm not good at asking questions it would seem.

What I wanted to know is: When you drink something, like orange juice, milk, soda etc. by what means, in the body, is the water separated from the other things in it which made the solution you drank. Also, does the separation of water from everything else take the expendature of ATP?

The OJ you drink is mostly water. It's got some suspended solids in it in the form of pulp, which gets digested by acid in your stomach. It's got a lot of sugars, and vitamins, and other various biological compounds in it. When it gets to your intestine, the water, and other compounds, is taken through your intestinal wall, and to the necessary parts of your body via the blood stream. the water itself spreads mostly through diffusion. The OJ is mostly water, but so are your intestinal fluids, your intestines, your blood, and every single cell in your body. If you ran a labelling experiment and drank labeled water, in a very short amount of time that water would be just about everywhere in your body. So it does not take any energy to take in water. Since your intestinal wall is essentially a semipermeable membrane, you can chalk this up to osmosis.

 

[Monique]

Water uptake in the bowel
http://www.siumed.edu/mrc/research/nutrient/gi42sg.html

It is a passive process based on osmotic gradients. So wouldn't pure water pass through more readily?

Intestinal absorption of water is a passive process and requires movement of solutes. Water accompanies solute and moves across the intestinal mucosa in response to osmotic gradients. The rate of water uptake in any region of the intestine is a function of solute absorption in this region. All areas of the intestines (including small bowel and colon) absorb water, the relative amounts absorbed depending on the presence of solutes, and the types of solutes present. In the jejunum, the active transport of sugars and amino acids causes passive movement of salt and water, which accounts for most of the water uptake in this area. In the ileum, most water movement is accounted for by active sodium transport. As described in Johnson (Gastrointestinal Physiology), coupled water and sodium transport involves a specialized mechanism that pumps sodium into the lateral spaces, resulting in relatively high osmotic pressure in that region. Water then enters the lateral space from the cell (transcellular flux) and--perhaps--the lumen (paracellular flux), reducing the osmotic pressure but increasing the hydrostatic pressure. Fluid is then forced out of the lateral space into the interstitial space. The net effect is that isotonic fluid is transported from the lumen into the extracellular fluid. This hypothesis of fluid absorption is illustrated in Figure 12-5, on page 137 of the Johnson resource.

 

[Another God]

Originally posted by Monique
It is a passive process based on osmotic gradients. So wouldn't pure water pass through more readily?

In theory, yes... If it is based on osmotic pressures, then pure water would increase the osmotic pressure dastically and diffuse outwards. On the other hand, assuming OJ had a lower salt conc. than your body, it would also raise the pressure and push outwards too, so you could drink tons of OJ and raise the osmotic pressure quickly through shear volume.

*shrugs*