The research from Penn State discovered a new method of separating rare earth elements using bacterial protein, which has a unique ability to distinguish between different rare earths.
Penn State researchers have discovered a protein found naturally in a bacterium isolated from English oak buds exhibits strong capabilities to differentiate between rare earths. Harnessing its power could revolutionize the entire tech sector by fundamentally changing how critical minerals like rare earths are harvested and purified. Image Credit: Penn State.
“If you can harvest rare earths from devices that we already have, then we may not be so reliant on mining it in the first place,” Cotruvo said. However, he added that regardless of source, the challenge of separating one rare earth from another to get a pure substance remains. “There is getting them out of the rock, which is one part of the problem, but one for which many solutions exist,” Cotruvo said. “But you run into a second problem once they are out, because you need to separate multiple rare earths from one another. This is the biggest and most interesting challenge, discriminating between the individual rare earths, because they are so alike. We’ve taken a natural protein, which we call lanmodulin or LanM, and engineered it to do just that.
The researchers found that the lanmodulin from this bacterium exhibited strong capabilities to differentiate between rare earths. Their studies indicated that this differentiation came from an ability of the protein to dimerize and perform a kind of handshake. When the protein binds one of the lighter lanthanides, like neodymium, the handshake is strong.
Because this amino acid is part of a network of interconnected amino acids at the interface with the other monomer, this shift altered how the two protein units interacted. When an amino acid that is a key player in this network was removed, the protein was much less sensitive to rare earth identity and size. The findings revealed a new, natural principle for fine-tuning rare earth separations, based on propagation of miniscule differences at the rare earth binding site to the dimer interface.
Cotruvo believes that the concept of binding rare earths at a molecular interface, such that dimerization is dependent on the exact size of the metal ion, can be a powerful approach for accomplishing challenging separations.“This is the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “With further optimization of this phenomenon, the toughest problem of all – efficient separation of rare earths that are right next to each other on the periodic table – may be within reach.
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