Can We Use Bacteria to Refine Rare Earths?

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[the-quintessenz]

Since lithium is concentrated in tobacco, we could use the lungs of smokers as a resource depot.

[ashmoleproductions]

This field is called Bioming. It involves two processes and needs the presence of Iron (or Molybdenum to a much smaller extant) or Sulfur as fuel for the microorganisms. These processes are bioleaching or biooxidation. Bioleaching dissolves the required minerals using acid the bacteria regenerate the acid. Biooxidation dissolves everything but the metal you want usually gold. Currently getting my masters in the topic

[Xylos]

In The US we don't refine monozite ores because it includes Thorium, and while the EPA will let mining companies toss any thorium-containing ore back into the ground and pretend like they never dug it up, if they refine the ore at all to extract anything, that *technically* concentrates the thorium, and now you have a whole bunch of regulations dealing with radioactivity and nuclear material to deal with. So we don't do it. Because we have to treat an alpha emitter with a 14 billion year half-life like it's cobalt 60.

[schmitzbeats]

Modern electronics junk should have rare earths in comparatively higher concentrations. We should do more recycling. Screens, Leds, Speakers, Motors.

[CaptainManic]

Dude just the bloody title is enough to earn a like and comment.

You're brilliant mate.

Thanks for your work.

[bravosierra]

I am the least technical minded person there is around. But for some reason I find your presentations very interesting & I try my best to listen & understand. Good job you’re doing.

[timwildauer]

Fascinating, I never would have guessed you could use bacteria in this way. Another amazing video, as always. We greatly appreciate you!

[michaelhart]

IMO, the potential is actually greater than you describe.

Smith and Winter received the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2018 for their work on phage display in bacteria. This allows for the directed evolution of bacterial proteins infected with viral phage proteins. The power of this directed evolution technique is awesome.

If the value of the metal purified is great enough, then many things become economically possible. One springs to my mind. When somebody takes the trouble to do so, they will probably be able to produce bacterial-phage proteins that can selectively extract Uranium235 from seawater, in preference to extracting the unwanted Uranium238. The economic consequences of that are tremendous for world energy production.

[danheidel]

If iron nitride magnets live up to their promise, we could be looking at a market collapse of neodymium at least.

[samw]

Again, great video. REE's being *rare* but not rare. Just curious: has Asianometry come across any biological/microbial research on the separation of Nd/Pr, which are chemically very similar? As I understand it, the challenge posed by their separation is a significant bottleneck in the recycling and refining of scrap rare earth magnets, on an industrial scale.

[BurleyBoar]

Anyone else remember a mid scifi book aimed at young adults that had this as the solution to the book? I read it around 1989 in 7th or 8th grade. For the love of me I can not remember it's name. The plot was humans colonized a seemingly perfect planet and ooops all the metal is not concentrated anywhere and spread around. It makes life difficult for bio-accumulation. The culture regresses as they have almost no metal and the core of remaining scientists keeps trying to use fusion to make metals with no luck. Then at the end someone figures out bacteria can collect metals and they can get back to a thriving culture. It may of been a trilogy.
Oh! Another good video Asinometry. You are so worth the patreon to me.

[contretemps]

thank you for being such a good source of information and having such a nice voice!!

[crow]

God this channel is so great. Showing me things i’ve never even thought up. I wonder what the future of Biological Applications of living creatures will look like once we develop better methods and technology to properly and safely use different forms of life to our advantage

[MagnumInnominandum]

The mycelium of many fungal species concentrate heavy metals including Plutonium, Neptunium, Uranium.

[AnarchoCatBoyEthan]

very interesting, i appreciate you always putting out such high quality interesting videos.

[RonJohn]

6:04 "If he dies, he dies."

[michaelperrone]

If we could produce scandium from coal fly ash, the demand would probably go up- it's an extremely useful element and the only reason it isn't utilized more often is due to scarcity. Also E-waste recycling for REEs could be improved by this bacteria approach

[heinerwutz]

I love your videos, and usually I learn a lot about a topic where I have no clue about. Well this time I actually know a bit about the topic. I am a microbiologist and I did my PhD on bacteria that occur in hydrothermal systems. These bugs actually use REE as cofactor in one of their enzymes. If you are interested look into the "xoxF" methanol dehydrogenases.

[csours]

This is one of the coolest future techs! I'm also super interested in augmenting living systems with electricity - solar panels are many multiples more efficient than plants at collecting energy from sunlight, but living systems are genius at building atomic scale structures. What if we can use electricity to grow tiny workers for all kinds of things? Like what if we could make bacterial or fungal colonies that make graphene straight from atmospheric CO2?

[alexandermiller]

Such an interesting video. I recently did research on lithium extraction as well, Tesla had a patent on using a new mechano-chemistry process that mines lithium from clay deposits. Perhaps something similar can be done for REEs. We have to do something to reduce destruction of the environment in pursuit of these metals