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This study leverages the ancient craft of weaving to prepare membranes that can effectively treat oil/water mixtures, specifically challenging nanoemulsions. Drawing inspiration from the core-shell architecture of spider silk, we have engineered fibers, the fundamental building blocks for weaving membranes, that feature a mechanically robust core for tight weaving, coupled with a CO 2 -responsive shell that allows for on-demand wettability adjustments. Tightly weaving these fibers produces membranes with ideal pores, achieving over 99.6% separation efficiency for nanoemulsions with droplets as small as 20 nm. They offer high flux rates, on-demand self-cleaning, and can switch between sieving oil and water nanodroplets through simple CO 2 /N 2 stimulation. Moreover, weaving can produce sufficiently large membranes (4800 cm 2 ) to assemble a module that exhibits long-term stability and performance, surpassing state-of-the-art technologies for nanoemulsion separations, thus making industrial application a practical reality.

The successful implementation of thin-film composite membranes (TFCM) for challenging solute-solute separations in the pharmaceutical industry requires a fine control over the microstructure (size, distribution, and connectivity of the free-volume elements) and thickness of the selective layer. For example, desalinating antibiotic streams requires highly interconnected free-volume elements of the right size to block antibiotics but allow the passage of salt ions and water. Here, we introduce stevioside, a plant-derived contorted glycoside, as a promising aqueous phase monomer for optimizing the microstructure of TFCM made via interfacial polymerization. The low diffusion rate and moderate reactivity of stevioside, together with its nonplanar and distorted conformation, produced thin selective layers with an ideal microporosity for antibiotic desalination. For example, an optimized 18-nm membrane exhibited an unprecedented combination of high water permeance (81.2 liter m -2 hour -1 bar -1 ), antibiotic desalination efficiency (NaCl/tetracycline separation factor of 11.4), antifouling performance, and chlorine resistance.