
Rare earths are important components of wind turbines, catalytic converters, fibre optic cables and plasma screens. Since the 17 metals grouped under this term are indispensable for modern technologies, demand and costs are constantly rising. The occurrence of productive mining sites is limited and the production is often costly and environmentally harmful. The advantages of recycling these resources as efficiently as possible, for example from industrial waste water in the fields of mining, electronics or chemical catalysts, are obvious.
In cooperation with the University of Kaiserslautern, researchers at the Technical University of Munich have taken the circular economy of these demanded metals a huge step further: they examined several strains of cyanobacteria for their potential to bind rare earths from aqueous solution – and were successful.
The researchers determined the potential for the so-called biosorption of the rare earths lanthanum, cerium, neodymium and terbium for twelve strains of cyanobacteria. Most of these strains had never before been investigated for biotechnological potential. They come from habitats with extreme environmental conditions.
In a further project, the scientists plan to carry out the experiments on a larger scale in order to advance the industrial application of the results.
Original publication:
Michael Paper, Max Koch, Patrick Jung, Michael Lakatos, Tom Nilges and Thomas B. Brück: Rare Earths Stick to Rare Cyanobacteria: Future Potential for Bioremediation and Recovery of Rare Earth Elements. Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol., Sec. Bioprocess Engineering, Volume 11 – 2023

Weitere Spotlights
Spotlight June 2021: Endotoxin – the reason for false-positive toxicity testing for advanced materials?
Advanced materials, but also nanomaterials are closely examined to determine whether they trigger biological effects that could be harmful to humans and the environment before they are used in products. This also includes such materials as titanium dioxide, which has been used in a wide variety of products for more than 50 years. A particularly […]
Read moreSpotlight February 2023: New sustainable and promising method to give cotton textiles an antiviral and antibacterial finish
Textiles have been the subject of research into functionalization for many years, especially also to repel bacteria and viruses. Since the development of nanotechnological processes, there have been many attempts to incorporate UV protection with nano-titanium dioxide, or to provide textiles with anti-bacterial properties with nanosilver (see cross-sectional text “Nanoparticles in Textiles”). But nanosilver has […]
Read moreSpotlight September: A methodology for the automatic evaluation of data quality and completeness of nanomaterials for risk assessment purposes
This paper describes a method for automatically assessing the quality and completeness of nanosafety data for the purpose of risk assessment. Steps to develop the methodology for assessing data completeness and the methodology for assessing quality are presented. The methodology is tailored to physicochemical and hazard (meta) data, but can also be configured with appropriate […]
Read moreSpotlight October 2022: The titanium dioxide debate – why the current ECHA and EFSA hazard classification should be questioned
Due to various reports and scientific studies, titanium dioxide (TiO2)was also banned in Europe this year (2022) for use as a food additive with the indication that it could possibly be carcinogenic to humans. Although no case of tumour induction in humans has been reported since the use of this material in micro but also […]
Read more