Engineering biology for critical metal recovery from industrial wastestreams

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Metals play a central role in biology. Microbial processes, in particular, have evolved over several billions of years to bioprocess a broad range of metals, ensuring their incorporation into biomolecules as metal cofactors where needed, or to detoxify them when they accumulate to dangerous levels. Metals are also very important to industry being used inproducts spanning construction, transport, electronics, medicine and the chemical industries. Metals are especially important as catalysts, underpinning many sectors of the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. For example, metal catalysts are responsible for 30% of Europe's gross domestic product, and the processing of 80% of all manufactured products. However, the most important metals used for catalysis applications (e.g. palladium and platinum), are very expensive, in short supply and toxic to the environmental if released. The EB-MIND project brings together a unique group of world-renowned academics to develop an entirely new approach for recovering the metals needed for catalysis from waste industrial solutions, addressing these problems. EB-MIND will use state of the Engineering Biology tools to fine-tune metal-recovering microbes that live naturally in the environment, adapting them to the unique and toxic conditions in industrial waste, so that they can recover valuable metals from industrial waste streams and make unique, catalytically active nanoparticles for industrial use. Working with a major catalyst provider (Johnson Matthey) EB-MIND will explore how these novel Engineering Biology-enhanced biotechnological metal recovery processes can be used to support a globally important industry, and quantify the environmental impacts of these new processes within a low waste "circular economy".