Research

Critical Minerals and Materials

The United States faces critical vulnerabilities in national security due to the lack of domestic supplies for strategic minerals. Challenges and fundamental limitations with current recycling and recovery approaches, such as energy-intensive or chemical-intensive processes, poor efficiency, or the lack of adaptive selectivity needed to efficiently process variable feedstocks, are challenges and limitations that nature overcame billions of years ago. Tapping into biology's evolutionary toolkit, we are developing innovative and sustainable strategies for the recovery of critical minerals and materials. Metals, including rare earth elements (REEs) and strategic transition metals, such as cobalt and nickel, simultaneously serve as essential nutrients enabling chemistry but can be potentially lethal toxins. This nutrient-toxin duality, combined with intense competition for metals in natural environments, has driven microorganisms to evolve sophisticated molecular arsenals for metal acquisition: high-affinity chelators that solubilize metals from mineral matrices, selective transporters and chaperones that capture specific metals from complex mixtures, and regulatory systems that precisely control metal-processing machinery.

Many of the elements in the Periodic Table of Critical Minerals and Materials are essential or beneficial nutrients for biological systems, while many more elements are known to be absorbed or actively taken up. The genome-encoded interactions with critical minerals therefore offer a promising avenue for developing biotechnologies aimed at their sustainable and efficient recovery.

Source of Periodic Table of Critical Minerals and Materials: https://www.netl.doe.gov/resource-sustainability/critical-minerals-and-materials/rare-earth-elements

Biological solutions to balancing the essentiality and potential toxicity of metal nutrients.

Metal ions provide proteins with chemistry or folding properties that are not easily achieved with just amino acid sidechains. As a result, these elements have expanded the repertoire of protein-catalyzed reactions available to biology, including otherwise difficult chemistry, such as dinitrogen reduction, water oxidation, tunable electron transfer, and light harvesting. At the same time, if allowed to over accumulate or bind to the wrong proteins, their chemical reactivity can result in protein inhibition and cytotoxicity. Accordingly, genetically encoded metal homeostasis strategies ensure that a sufficient supply of metal ions is provisioned to metal-dependent proteins and for cofactor biosynthesis, while avoiding potentially damaging oversupply and mismetallation (binding of the wrong metal).

To uncover the mechanisms organisms use to balance the essentiality and potential toxicity of trace metal nutrients, we combine comparative genomics and data-mining with in vitro and in vivo experimental characterization, including functional genomics, molecular biology, genetics, biochemistry, and structural studies.

Engineering Living Materials

New materials that do more, using less, are needed to advance the U.S.'s economic competitiveness. Building materials with synthetic biology (SynBio) provides an unprecedented opportunity to achieve self-healing and dynamic properties that can only be achieved with complex biosystems, while leveraging the evolvability of genomes to discover and design novel bio-based and bio-inspired materials.

Leveraging algae for biomaterial synthesis.

A promising economic opportunity is to leverage the natural capabilities of microalgae and cyanobacteria to synthesize functional materials. By converting solar energy into chemical energy through light-harvesting, water splitting, electron transport, and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) synthesis, these photosynthetic microbes naturally capture carbon feedstocks from the air and convert that free source of biomass into organic compounds. These organic compounds, in turn, are the building blocks for natural and synthetic biomaterials.

Approaches:

comparative genomics for gene and pathway discovery
bioinformatics for functional predictions
forward genetic screening for robust synthetic pathway expression
in vitro and in vivo protein function characterization
genome engineering
experimental determination of bioproduct characteristics

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