UK public R&D funding body Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is putting £6.2 million behind a three-year project aiming to create a new generation of membranes from engineered proteins.
A multidisciplinary consortium led by University of Birmingham researchers will initially focus on separating lithium from sodium to produce high-purity lithium compounds for battery manufacturing. University of Birmingham and Aston University scientists say they will work with proteins known as S-layer proteins, which naturally assemble into highly ordered two-dimensional lattices on the surfaces of microorganisms. Thousands of possible protein variants will be designed and screened before the most promising candidates are mass-produced in “practical membrane systems”.
The research is said to be part of ARIA’s Universal Fabricators program, targeting the use of engineered proteins as programmable building blocks for next-generation manufacturing materials.
“Biology can construct ordered materials with precision that is extremely difficult to achieve using existing manufacturing methods,” University of Birmingham project lead Dr Dominik Kubicki said.
“We aim to harness this to create membranes with uniform, programmable pores.
“We are trying to establish a fundamentally new way of manufacturing functional materials.
“Separating lithium from sodium will be a demanding first test of this approach. If it works the approach could also enable more selective and potentially less energy-intensive separations in areas ranging from critical-mineral recovery and water treatment to chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing.”
Researchers are working with specialists in AI-guided design of proteins, protein screening and membrane manufacturing to accelerate the work.
“S-layer proteins offer an extraordinary starting point for materials engineering because they can spontaneously assemble into highly ordered structures,” University of Birmingham project co-lead Professor Tim Knowles said.
“By combining computational design, structural biology and experimental screening we aim to reprogram these natural building blocks to perform demanding technological functions.”
The university’s professor Owen Thomas said a key challenge would be translating molecular-level control into membranes that could be manufactured and operated at “useful scales”. Hence the focus on combining computational protein design, structural biology and high-throughput screening with protein production, membrane production and testing under realistic operating conditions.
“Close integration of biological design, materials characterisation and chemical engineering gives us the opportunity to address that challenge from the outset,” Thomas said.
Advanced characterisation techniques such as cryo-EM and neutron reflectometry would be used to study membrane structure at nanoscale. The measurements would help researchers understand how small changes in membrane structure affected selectivity, stability and transport performance.
Researchers said their ambition was to demonstrate continuous, robust membranes with precisely controlled pores one-to-50 angstroms wide.
