Birmingham scientists win £6.2m to build membranes from programmable proteins

Researchers at the University of Birmingham are leading a £6.2 million project to develop a new kind of membrane built from engineered proteins, which could one day change how critical minerals, water and medicines are processed.

The funding comes from the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, ARIA, the Government body set up to back high-risk, high-reward research. Aston University is also part of the consortium.

The lithium challenge

The three-year project will begin with one of the hardest problems in extracting lithium directly from brines: separating lithium from sodium. The two behave very similarly chemically, which makes producing the high-purity lithium needed for batteries difficult and energy-intensive.

The team aims to make large membranes with uniformly sized pores that can tell lithium and sodium ions apart.

Building with biology

The researchers will work with S-layer proteins, which naturally assemble into highly ordered, two-dimensional lattices on the surfaces of many microorganisms. Thousands of variants will be designed and screened, and the most promising produced at larger scale and built into practical membranes.

"Biology can construct ordered materials with precision that is extremely difficult to achieve using existing manufacturing methods. We aim to harness this to create membranes with uniform, programmable pores," said the project lead, Dr Dominik Kubicki of the University of Birmingham.

"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," he said. "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."

Co-lead Professor Tim Knowles said S-layer proteins "offer an extraordinary starting point for materials engineering because they can spontaneously assemble into highly ordered structures".

Industrial partners

• Fold9, led by Jude Wells, will lead the AI-guided design of the proteins.
• Evove, a UK membrane company, will contribute expertise in manufacturing, scale-up and testing.
• Adaptyv Bio will provide high-throughput protein screening, allowing large numbers of variants to be tested quickly.

The project is part of ARIA's Universal Fabricators programme, which aims to use engineered proteins as programmable building blocks for manufacturing materials with exceptional control over their shape.

Why lithium matters

Lithium is essential for the batteries in electric vehicles, phones and energy storage systems, and demand is expected to rise sharply as the world moves away from fossil fuels. Most lithium is currently produced in a handful of countries, and the UK wants to secure more of its own supply. More efficient ways of extracting it could make projects in the UK and elsewhere more viable, and reduce the environmental impact of production.

Research in Birmingham

The University of Birmingham is a leading centre for battery and critical materials research, with work spanning recycling, new battery chemistries and the supply of rare earth elements. Projects like this one offer students and early-career researchers the chance to work on technologies at the frontier of their fields.