Engineering biology for critical metal recovery from industrial wastestreams

金属在生物学中起着核心作用。特别是微生物过程，经过数十亿年的进化，可以对各种金属进行生物处理，确保它们在需要时作为金属辅因子掺入生物分子，或者在它们积累到危险水平时解毒。金属对工业也非常重要，用于建筑、运输、电子、医药和化学工业的产品。金属作为催化剂特别重要，是化学和制药工业许多部门的基础。例如，金属催化剂占欧洲国内生产总值的30%，占所有制成品的80%。然而，用于催化应用的最重要的金属（例如钯和铂）非常昂贵，供应短缺，并且如果释放则对环境有毒。EB-MIND项目汇集了一群世界知名的学者，开发了一种全新的方法，从工业废料中回收催化所需的金属，解决这些问题。EB-MIND将使用工程生物学工具来微调自然生活在环境中的金属回收微生物，使其适应工业废物中独特的有毒条件，以便它们可以从工业废物流中回收有价值的金属，并制造独特的催化活性纳米颗粒用于工业用途。EB-MIND将与主要催化剂供应商（约翰逊万丰）合作，探索这些新的工程生物学增强的生物技术金属回收工艺如何用于支持全球重要的行业，并量化这些新工艺在低废物“循环经济”中对环境的影响。

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".