Did you ever wonder what are the parts in your smartphone, laptop , etc. made of that make them go round? Well, have a read and find out!
Lanthanides, often referred to as the rare earth metals, are important materials for the manufacture of almost all electronics. Not just the majority of your favourite gadgets like smartphones, tablets and NVDs (if you use one) but also TVs, radios etc.
contain semiconductor elements made with those metals.
Also some lanthanides salts were applied as catalysts in some organic reactions.

Nowadays, most available lanthanide ores are already on the brink of total exploitation. More worryingly still,it is very hard to isolate and purify lanthanides from solid electronics waste or sewer. There are techniques to do so, such as ion-exchange chromatography,
but they are difficult to implement and rather ineffective, since the physical and chemical differences between these elements are small. This, in turn, renders them difficult to apply on an industrial scale. Faced with this predicament, we think that lanthanide recycling from waste seems a vital technological issue nowadays.

Henceforth, basing on the work done by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [1] and the University of Chicago [2], we created our lanthanide-oriented project, which has two main points:

Firstly, we would like to recreate part of the work done by the University of Chicago group in constructing an E.coli-based sensor system that would be capable of binding lanthanide ions using a modified two-componentPmrA/PmrB system from Salmonella,
and induce expression of GFP whenever such binding event occurred, allowing for detection of lanthanide ions in the environment. Secondly, we intend to devise a method for quantification of these ions using fluorescence measurements while creating BioBrick elements for respective elements of this system.
However, our ultimate goal is to invent a bacterial system capable of detecting and binding lanthanide ions (via lanthanide-binding proteins). The ions could be later extracted from the protein which in turn allow us to recycle these valuable metals from the liquid waste.

To sum up, a bacterial system providing both signalling the presence of lanthanides in a liquid medium (e.g. sewer waste) in an easy-to-detect way and production of proteins that bind these lanthanides in stable complexes was proposed.
Moreover, design of abovementioned binding systems is the first step to creating an easy and efficient technology for eco-friendly retrieval of those industrially significant elements, and we look forward to potential collaborations with iGEM teams that share our goals in this year’s competition!