Palladium and platinum catalysts are responsible for 30% of Europe’s GDP and 80% of all manufactured products, yet these metals are expensive, scarce, and toxic if released into the environment. This project engineers microbes that naturally recover metals from their surroundings, adapting them to survive the harsh chemical conditions inside industrial waste streams. The goal is to turn those microbes into living factories that pull out valuable catalytic metals and assemble them into nanoparticles ready for reuse. Working with Johnson Matthey, a major catalyst supplier, the team will test whether these engineered biological processes can plug into real industrial supply chains. If successful, the approach could reduce dependence on mined metals, cut the environmental damage from metal waste, and keep critical materials circulating in a circular economy rather than being discarded. The research is applied from the start—it aims to deliver a working biotechnology for an industry that quietly underpins everything from pharmaceuticals to electronics.
View original technical description
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 in products 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".
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know