Peptides as biosorbents for the recovery of yttrium present in waste of electrical and electronic equipment

Abstract

The project focuses on the recovery of yttrium, a rare earth element (REE), classified as a critical raw material (CRM), due to its applications in the electronics field. CRMs are essential materials in the development of novel high-tech applications and include metals such as precious and REE. Since the sustainable supply of critical metals is a major concern, there is an increasing interest in secondary sources such as waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). WEEE is defined as an amalgam of various metals (including REEs), and the scientific community is trying to improve metal recovery from it using different approaches. One of the most innovative approaches are the bio-based methods, which are more sustainable in comparison to the traditional ones. Among the bio-based processes is biosorption, which is a physicochemical process that uses bio-derived materials to remove metals from a solution. Biosorption processes use diverse kinds of biomasses; however, these materials are not very specific as complex biomass offer many functional groups that are interacting rather unspecifically with different kind of metals. The usage of well-defined biomolecules, such as proteins, offers the possibility to introduce functionalities that specifically interact with metals. An innovative approach to the expression of specific metal-binding proteins is the Phage Display (PD). PD is a powerful technique for the identification and selection of peptides with high affinity and specificity for a specific target. In this sense, this project aims to select peptides to bind to yttrium (Y) particles in a suspension. To achieve this goal, a peptide library will be used to select high-affinity peptides against Y by PD. Therefore, it is expected to obtain Y-specific high-affinity peptides to be applied in biosorption processes. (AU)