Researchers have engineered a protein that sorts crucial rare earth elements quickly and without any of the noxious chemicals currently used.
The device you're currently reading this story on needs tiny chunks of metals like neodymium and dysprosium to work. So do wind turbines, electric vehicles and lasers. These rare earth elements are vital to modern technology, but they're hard to mine and recycle because they're tricky to distinguish from each other. Now, a team of US researchers has engineered a protein that sorts rare earth elements quickly and without any of the extra energy or noxious chemicals currently used industrially. Their findings are published in Nature. "Biology manages to differentiate rare earths from all the other metals out there — and now, we can see how it even differentiates between the rare earths it finds useful and the ones it doesn't," says lead author Associate Professor Joseph Cotruvo Jr., a chemist at Penn State University, US. "We're showing how we can adapt these approaches for rare earth recovery and separation." The protein specifically focuses on lanthanides: the class of 15 elements following lanthanum in the periodic table. Lanthanides are relatively abundant in the Earth's crust – but they're mostly present in low concentrations. They all have similar atomic sizes and chemical properties, which makes them very hard to separate. Separating lanthanides needs dozens, sometimes hundreds, of reactions,…