Rare earth elements (REEs) are essential for improving modern smart devices, renewable energy technologies, and chemical supply chains. However, governments around the world consider REEs at severe risk of supply chain disruptions. This is partially because REEs are diffusely distributed within the earth’s crust, so enormous amounts of ore must be mined to meet production demands. Furthermore, current chemical methods for processing this ore are either untenably expensive, or sufficiently environmentally hazardous that many REE deposits are not operated out of concern for the health of nearby communities. We aim to address these issues by leveraging microbial REE metabolisms for scalable, environmentally friendly, and non-toxic processing of REEs from environmental and recycled sources.

Several microbes are known to specifically utilize REEs in their metabolisms, including Methylrubrum extorquens and Pseudomonas putida. We are leveraging our expertise in biosensor development, protein engineering, and microbial synthetic biology to study and improve the proteins that these organisms use to selectively bind and transport REEs. We intend to simultaneously study the biochemistry of REE biology and prototype pipelines for scalable bio-based REE extraction and recycling. With this work, we aim to leverage advances in computational biology, protein engineering and synthetic biology to tangibly strengthen the REE supply chains that modern innovative information and energy technologies rely on.

This project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between a variety of labs, including those of Dr. Andrew Ellington (Biochemistry), Dr. Jonathan Sessler (Chemistry), Dr. Manish Kumar (Environmental Engineering), and Dr. Benjamin Keitz (Chemical Engineering). Furthermore, we closely collaborate with local partners in the US Army Corps of Engineers’ (USACE) Engineering Research and Development Center (ERDC) to provide tangible opportunities for accelerated technology transfer from the lab to the world.

Associated Lab members:

Steven Zilko

Marcus Benyamin