Sustainable Bio-mining
Many of our high-end devices require rare-earth elements (REEs), a group of heavy metals with interesting electronic and magnetic properties. The Earth actually contains an abundant supply of these metals, but the process of extracting them is difficult, expensive, and toxic, resulting in substantial environmental contamination.
However, certain microbes are naturally very good at extracting REEs from soil through non-toxic processes. We are discovering and developing organisms and biomolecules capable of dissolving, binding, and enriching valuable REEs. This innovative combination of discovery and screening approaches has the potential to produce industry-ready organisms and biomolecules that can be used to replace current chemical and physical REE purification/extraction methods with scalable biological ones.
Update 9/27/2023: You can read our preprint, LanTERN: a fluorescent sensor that specifically binds lanthanides, here. This work was led by Ethan Jones.