UK's Advanced Research + Invention Agency backs advanced materials projects
£50mln funding aims to develop ways of manufacturing advanced materials at scale using proteins.
The Universal Fabricators programme from the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) aims to bridge the gap between molecular-level precision and high-volume production.
By harnessing proteins, ARIA hopes the projects can manufacture a versatile range of advanced inorganic and composite materials that can outperform what industry can
mass-produce today.
The agency comments that modern manufacturing forces a trade-off between cost, precision and production volume, and that biology offers a sustainable alternative by using proteins to turn abundant, ordinary ingredients into tough and highly structured materials at room temperature.
Building on artificial intelligence breakthroughs like AlphaFold - which enable the design of entirely new proteins - researchers are now tackling the ‘protein assembly problem’ to direct trillions of designed or naturally abundant proteins and surrounding minerals to self-organise into scaleable, tangible materials.
Ivan Jayapurna, Programme Director for Universal Fabricators at ARIA, says, 'Ages of human history are defined by new materials, but materials change the world only when processes are developed to make them cheap and abundant. Today proteins are thought of as soft, squishy biologics used for drugs and biocatalysis.
'But we believe that proteins are a uniquely powerful toolkit to break the precision-volume tradeoff in industrial manufacturing. Our mission is to prove that proteins are 'universal fabricators' that can mass manufacture molecularly precise inorganic and composite materials that will revolutionise our electronics, energy, infrastructure and more.'
The 11 research projects ARIA is funding span the breadth of the UK and include Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Sheffield, Birmingham, Cambridge, Bath and London - as well as Seattle and Berkeley in the US.
Research teams are addressing three core engineering challenges, each paired with a high-value material industry needs that currently struggles to mass-produce:
- Fibres: using proteins to grow hollow-core optical fibres, of the kind used in telecommunications, interconnects, lasing and sensing cables, with shapes and features that conventional fibre-drawing processes cannot produce.
- Membranes: growing defect-free protein sheets, hardened with minerals, into filters with precisely sized pores. One example target is separating lithium from magnesium, two ions of almost identical size, which could make the separation stage of lithium refining more efficient.
- Magnets: using proteins as nanoscale scaffolds to grow and align magnetic crystals, with the aim of producing high-performance magnets that do not rely on rare-earth elements.
