Funding to enable precise and scalable manufacturing of advanced materials

Professor Louise Horsfall has been awarded a £5m grant to develop a scalable protein-programmed manufacturing platform for advanced materials with a variety of industrial uses.

The funding from Advanced Research + Invention Agency’s (ARIA) Universal Fabricators programme will unlock technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone. 

The three-year programme will allow Louise’s team to build two-dimensional metal-protein frameworks with a range of applications, including filtering and capturing high-value minerals such as lithium.

Lithium is in high demand globally for the production of electric vehicle batteries. 

The team will assemble frameworks from surface layer (S-layer) proteins, that form the outer coat of most archaea and many bacteria, and naturally assemble into regular, porous sheets.

They hope that the S-layer proteins can be combined with metals and scaled up to produce large sheets, free of defects – known as S-Lattices.

Louise Horsfall

The S-LATTICE project will first target the industrial challenge of the sustainable extraction of lithium and allowing its recovery in battery recycling processes. 

They will build precision-engineered membranes with selective permeability to separate lithium ions from other metal ions with similar sizes and properties.

Extracting lithium often involves separating it from other metals, such as magnesium and sodium, in complex fluids known as lithium brines and leachates. This process is currently a key bottleneck in the critical minerals processing chain. 

Precise Filtration

To achieve ultra-precise filtration the team will engineer the S-layer proteins and incorporate chemical functionalities beyond those available in nature.

They will use metal-binding chemistry to create hybrid metal-protein frameworks with highly tailorable pore sizes and spacing.

Manufacturing with molecular precision is crucial for state-of-the-art material performance, and proteins represent a uniquely powerful toolkit to achieve this.

Proteins, the molecules that build and run every living thing, have the unique capability to turn ordinary, abundant ingredients into hard, precise materials like bone and seashell.

Precision metal-protein frameworks could also be engineered for new purposes beyond filtration. 

The team could build in catalytic functions, or make materials that interact with light, through the incorporation of ordered metal nanoparticles and quantum dots. 

The project, led by Professor Horsfall, includes an international team of researchers from the University of East Anglia, University of Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Rice University and Princeton University.

Universal Fabricators Programme

The project is one of 11 that will take on the challenge of developing scalable manufacturing processes. The teams will use proteins as manufacturing tools to assemble advanced materials that can outperform what industry can mass-manufacture today. 

Manufacturing today forces a choice between precision and volume. Defects are common at large scales, whilst more precise methods are expensive and energy-hungry.

The programme’s aim is to prove that protein-programmed manufacturing can combine molecular precision with reliable, industrial-scale production.

Protein membranes based on self-assembling S-layers could transform how we extract lithium, and I'm delighted to lead an international team working to make that a reality. ARIA's support gives us the freedom to take this bold approach, we’re excited to join their community of creators and get started.

Professor Louise Horsfall Chair of Sustainable Biotechnology

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