The Construction of a Microbial Synthesis System for Rare Earth Enrichment and Material Applications

Abstract

Rare earth materials play an irreplaceable role in biomedical and high technology fields. However, typical mining and extraction approaches to rare earth elements (REEs) often lead to severe environmental problems and resource wastage due to the involvement of hazardous chemicals. Although biomining shows elegant alternatives, there are still grand challenges to sustainably isolate and recover REEs in nature because of insufficient metal‐extracting microbes and RE‐scavenging macromolecular tools. To obtain high‐performance rare earth materials directly from rare earth ore, a new generation of biological synthesis strategies needs to be developed for the efficient preparation of REEs. The microbial synthesis system established here has achieved active biomanufacturing of high‐purity rare earth products. Further, through employing robust affinity columns bioconjugated with structurally engineered proteins, outstanding separation of Eu/Lu and Dy/La is acquired with the purity of 99.9% (Eu), 97.1% (La), and 92.7% (Dy). More importantly, in situ one‐pot synthesis of lanthanide‐dependent methanol dehydrogenase is well harnessed and exclusively adsorbs La, Ce, Pr, and Nd in RE tailing for advanced biocatalysis, indicating high value‐added application. Therefore, this novel biosynthetic platform provides an insightful roadmap to expand the scope of chassis engineering in terms of biofoundry and to manufacture valuable bioproducts related to REEs.

Recovery of rare earth elements from low-grade coal fly ash using a recyclable protein biosorbent

“…In another study inspired by LanM, chimeric protein DLanM containing two copies of LanM was immobilized onto agarose microbeads using a Cnbr-activated amine condensation reaction. The fixed bed column was then packed with DLanM–agarose for the selective recovery of REEs under flow-through conditions ( Cui et al, 2023 ). In a recent study, SpyTag–SpyCatcher (Spy) chemistry was harnessed for bioconjugation to obtain REE-binding biomaterials; SpyCatcher-fused LanM was immobilized on the surface of SpyTag-functionalized magnetic nanoparticles.…”

“…Moreover, the orientation and conformation of proteins are also hard to control, which may negatively impact protein stability/activity ( Ye et al, 2023b ). It is also important to consider the use of a non-adsorptive support matrix that allows the selectivity of the REE binding protein to determine the purity of the recovered metal solution and avoids potential matrix-mediated sorption of non-REEs and REEs; for example, non-protein-conjugated agarose microbeads showed an adsorption capacity of 4.38 μg mL -1 for La +3 (4,380 ppb or 31 µM) at pH 3.5 ( Brewer et al, 2019a ; Cui et al, 2023 ).…”