The three-year initiative will initially target one of the toughest challenges in direct lithium extraction: separating lithium from sodium to produce the high-purity lithium compounds required for battery manufacturing. The approach uses S-layer proteins, which naturally form highly ordered structures on the surfaces of microorganisms, modified to create membranes with uniform, programmable pores ranging from 1 to 50 angstroms.
Project lead Dr. Dominik Kubicki, associate professor in the School of Chemistry at the University of Birmingham, said biology can construct ordered materials with a precision that is extremely difficult to achieve using existing manufacturing methods, and the team aims to harness that to create membranes with uniform, programmable pores. Researchers will design and screen thousands of protein variants before scaling the most promising candidates for membrane manufacturing and testing.
The honest caveat is scale. Success depends on whether the precision of biological structures can be translated into durable membranes capable of operating at industrial scales, and the project is a three-year research effort, not a pilot plant. If it works, the technology could extend beyond battery materials to critical-minerals recovery, water treatment, and chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing.