Award summary

100% Home fees covered and a minimum tax-free annual living allowance of £31,805 per year for students who are eligible for Home fee status.

Overview

Technologically critical rare-earth elements (REEs) are essential to key sectors in the modern economy including the electronic, energy, pharmaceutical and automobile industries. Despite their importance, these critical elements are notoriously difficult to isolate from natural sources, with widely used hydrometallurgical liquid–liquid extraction methods reliant on the extensive use of organic solvents and toxic extractants.

For these reasons, there is a pressing need to develop new biobased extraction methods to support the exponentially growing global demand for REEs. Lanthanophores are a family of recently identified secreted bacterial proteins that facilitate the acquisition, transport, and integration of REEs into microbial metabolic processes. During this interdisciplinary project, which combines microbiology, structural biology, AI guided protein engineering and chemical analysis, you will establish the molecular basis of REE binding and discrimination in naturally evolved lanthanophores, establishing the ‘rules’ of REE acquisition in biology.

With this knowledge in hand, you will then use AI guided protein engineering to explore the feasibility of developing ‘designer’ lanthanophores. Finally, natural and engineered lanthanophores will be integrated into our established flow system to investigate their capacity to recover REEs from environmental samples. This project will be conducted in partnership with scientists at the UK’s national synchrotron facility Diamond Light Source, making use of recently established instrumentation for the study of REEs in biology.