At CMI Team member Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, CMI research developed in a collaboration between LLNL and Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) has generated a portfolio of intellectual property (IP), jointly owned by both organizations, that uses bacterial proteins to pick out critical metal ions. Now, the technology is licensed to CMI Team member Alta Resource Technologies, an advanced biochemistry start-up company. Alta plans to develop the technology at scale. The result could decrease the footprint of mining and is an example of how LLNL’s mission-based work can impact U.S. economic competitiveness through technology transfer.
“We’re taking inspiration from nature,” said CMI Project Lead Dan Park, scientist at LLNL. “There’s a subset of bacteria that naturally need to mine rare earth [elements] for an enzyme that enables their growth. So, they've evolved these pathways to selectively recover and separate them.”
Collaborators at Penn State, led by CMI researcher Joseph Cotruvo, Jr., discovered and characterized several specific proteins within the bacteria that attract rare-earth elements and differentiate between them. These are both important features, as the elements have very similar properties and occur in the same deposits of material. While essential for their use in technology, it is typically energy intensive and costly to separate rare-earth elements.
See the full story: Inspired by nature, proteins pick out mission-critical metals