We are engineering strains to enhance sustainable production/recovery of value added products, including plastics and potent magnets.

Lanthanides are potent super magnets, super conductors, and fluorescent elements that are used in most of our technological gadgets. Unfortunately, mining and extraction of these insoluble metals is cost prohibitive and extremely harmful for the environment. We have shown that M. extorquens is an efficient biometallurgic platform (Martinez-Gomez, 2016) and we are currently developing strategies to efficiently and selectively recover lanthanides from recycled sources.