Oak buds contain bacteria that help isolate rare earth elements
Getty Images/Anna Hedery
Bacterial proteins found in English oak buds may be used to more efficiently process rare earth elements required for various technologies.
Rare earth elements are used in products such as smartphones, television screens, electric vehicle motors, and wind turbines. Natural deposits of these elements are found and mined in multiple countries. However, the industrial separation facilities required to process them typically use energy-intensive methods requiring hundreds of steps and using many toxic chemicals, which are It could be simplified by natural shortcuts provided by different types of bacteria.
Joseph Cottorbo Jr. and his colleagues at Penn State University discovered this bacterium. Hanschlegelia serrata contains proteins that help distinguish between light and heavy types of rare earth elements. They isolated bacteria from English oak buds, testing hundreds of such bacterial proteins. This was done on the basis of previous work that showed how proteins contained in the Metrorif class of bacteria help separate rare and non-rare earth elements.
The researchers found that when a bacterial protein binds to a light rare-earth element, it likely binds to another unit of itself. When proteins bind to heavier rare earth elements, they are more likely to remain single.
This discovery allowed the researchers to show how this protein could help separate neodymium and dysprosium.
It uses heavy rare earth elements and heavy rare earth elements used in permanent magnets in a single chemical step at room temperature without resorting to toxic chemicals.
This approach could help process rare earth elements recovered from high-tech products that are mined from the ground or recycled.
Jason Love, from the University of Edinburgh, UK, said the work was a “proof of concept” approach and that major challenges still face to make rare-earth elements processable on a large industrial scale. . “The key problem with biochemical approaches is ‘manufacturing’ enough protein to be able to perform these separations on a large scale.”
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