2022: Microfluidic-accelerated Directed Evolution for Sustainable Rare Earth Separation
Rare earth elements (REE) are critical ingredients of sustainable energy technologies. However, separating individual REE is one of the hardest problems in chemistry—and current separation methods are highly environmentally damaging. Biosorption offers a promising route to environmentally-friendly REE separation. The research team has recently completed a genome-wide survey of biosorption and discovered six groups of bacteria genes that control binding preference for individual REE. They are seeking to build microfluidic evolution devices that will make it possible to rapidly engineer bacteria with a high affinity for individual REE to enable separations.
Investigators: Mingming Wu, Biological & Environmental Engineering; Buz Barstow, Biological & Environmental Engineering; Justin Wilson, Chemistry & Chemical Biology