NSF-DBT: Biomolecular Engineering for Critical Mineral Recovery

Critical minerals are essential to the U.S. economy and national security. Critical minerals are used in manufacturing computers, cell phones, solar panels, batteries, and many other electronic devices and advanced technologies. The U.S. imports many critical minerals, which means disruptions in their supply chains pose significant risks. New methods to recover and recycle critical minerals could help mitigate these risks. This project will develop new materials and organisms that can separate, recover, and recycle critical minerals from waste streams. In addition, the project will support education and outreach activities for K-12 students and research opportunities for undergraduates to help stimulate interest in STEM and expand the science and engineering future workforce. The overall goal of the project is to engineer biomaterials that bind critical minerals. The team will focus first on peptides, enzymes, and whole cells that can bind critical minerals. It will identify and validate existing critical mineral binding peptides (CMPs). New CMPs will be developed using rational and combinatorial approaches. Structure-function studies will be performed using a selected group of enzyme variants that display activity as critical mineral reductases (CMRases). Insights will shed new light on how these unique reductases bind to and then reduce critical mineral substrates to their elemental form. Finally, lessons learned regarding CMP and CMRase functions will be combined to develop robust microbial strains for efficient critical mineral recovery. This will be accomplished by developing a genetic screen to facilitate in vivo functional assays and enable directed evolution of improved CMPs and CMRases. Understanding the fundamental mechanisms regarding how biomolecules and microbial catalysts both bind and then reduce critical minerals will allow the selection and design of CMPs and CMRases with enhanced activities, enabling their future deployment within microbial systems for critical mineral recovery. This project involves a collaboration between researchers from the United State and India. It is jointly supported by the US National Science Foundation and the Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India (NSF-DBT). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.