  Aquaporins (AQPs) are a family of transmembrane channels that are found from
archaea, eubacteria, and fungi kingdoms to plants and animals. These proteins
play a major role in water and small solutes transport across biological cell
membranes and maintain the osmotic balance of living cells. In this sense, many
works in recent years have been devoted to understanding their behavior,
including in plants, where 5 major groups of AQPs have been identified, whose
physiological function details still have open questions waiting for an answer.
In this direction, we observed in the literature very few Molecular Modeling
studies focusing on plant AQPs. It creates a gap in the proper depiction of
AQPs since Molecular Simulations allow us to get information that is usually
inaccessible by experiments. Likewise, many efforts have been made to create
artificial nanochannels with improved properties. It has the potential to help
humanity (and plants) to face water stress -- a current problem that will be
worsened by Climate Change. In this short review, we will revisit and discuss
important computational studies about plant aquaporins and artificial
transmembrane channels. With this, we aim to show how the Molecular Modeling
community can (and should) help to understand plants' AQPs properties and
function and how we can create new nanotechnology-based artificial channels.
