Enabling manufacturing of Functional Nanomaterials using SynBio

今年，全球对纳米材料的需求将比2012年增长2.5倍，纳米材料已经是一个价值数十亿美元的产业。与生产散装和精细化学品相比，目前的纳米材料生产方法至少浪费1000倍。因此，迫切需要开发纳米材料的绿色生产方法，这种方法可以更好地控制材料特性，但需要更少的能源，产生更少的废物（即生态友好型）并且具有成本效益。自然界通过在环境条件下的自组装（生物矿化），以最大的规模生产了60多种不同的无机纳米材料（如CaCO3、Fe3O4、二氧化硅）。虽然合成纳米材料的生物方法（例如使用微生物或复合酶）在减轻环境负担方面是有效的，但它们昂贵、低效和/或目前无法扩展到工业生产。我们将采用合成生物学（SynBio）方法，这是EPSRC的核心战略主题之一，通过利用生物学原理设计先进的纳米材料，从而实现新的制造方法。SynBio是生产高精度先进功能纳米材料的强大工具，我们的方法结合了“未来8大技术”中的两项（“合成生物学”和“先进纳米材料”）。我们的SynBio策略不是使用细胞或微生物，而是使用受生物矿化启发的合成分子（SynBio添加剂）。SynBio在温和（环境）条件下生产各种定义良好且可调的纳米材料，速度快，浪费少。我们的SynBio方法提供了高产量的潜力，就像传统的化学沉淀法一样，同时具有生物矿化的精度、定制化、效率和低浪费。生物启发合成纳米材料的大部分研究都是在小规模上进行的，尽管基于生物启发方法开发纳米材料制造有很好的机会，但还没有关于大规模研究的报道。采用生物启发的SynBio方法，该项目将使二氧化硅和磁性纳米颗粒（SNP和MNP）的可控合成和可扩展性成为可能，全球价值约110亿美元。这些方法更容易扩大规模，可以真正被认为是“绿色的”。这种合成生物工艺可以减少制造过程中的碳足迹（减少50%到90%），从而为工业提供了显著的成本效益。

This year, the global demand for nanomaterial, which is already a multi-billion$ industry, will have grown 2.5-fold since 2012. Current nanomaterials production methods are at least 1000 times more wasteful when compared to the production of bulk and fine chemicals. Consequently there is an urgent need to develop green production methods for nanomaterials which can allow greater control over materials properties, yet require less energy, produce less waste (i.e. eco-friendly) and are cost-effective. Nature produces more than 60 distinct inorganic nanomaterials (e.g. CaCO3, Fe3O4, silica) on the largest of scales through self-assembly under ambient conditions (biomineralisation). Although biological methods for nanomaterials synthesis (e.g. using microorganisms or complex enzymes) are effective in reducing environmental burden, they are expensive, inefficient and/or currently not scalable to industrial production. We will adopt a synthetic biology (SynBio) approach, which is one of the EPSRC's core strategic themes, by harnessing the biological principles to design advanced nanomaterials leading to novel manufacturing methods. SynBio is a very powerful tool for the production of high-precision advanced functional nanomaterials and our approach marries two of the "8 great technologies for the future" ("Synthetic Biology" and "Advanced Nanomaterials"). Instead of using cells or microbes, our SynBio strategy uses synthetic molecules (SynBio additives) inspired from biomineralisation. SynBio produces a wide range of well-defined and tunable nanomaterials under mild (ambient) conditions, quickly and with little waste. Our SynBio approach offers the potential for high-yields, like the traditional chemical precipitation method, together with the precision, customisation, efficiency and low waste of biomineralisation.The bulk of research on bioinspired synthesis of nanomaterials has been performed at small scales and, although there are good opportunities for developing nanomaterials manufacturing based on bioinspired approaches, there are no reports on larger-scale investigations. Adopting a bioinspired SynBio approach, this project will enable the controlled synthesis and scalability of silica and magnetic nanoparticles (SNP and MNP) which are worth ~$11 billion globally. These methods are far more amenable to scale-up and can truly be considered 'green'. This SynBio process can reduce the manufacturing carbon footprint (by >90%), thus providing a significant cost benefit to industry.