Cambridge researchers awarded ARIA funding

The funding is part of ARIA’s Universal Fabricators Programme, a three-year, £50 million programme that will support 11 different research teams. The programme’s central bet is that proteins can act as a ‘universal fabricator’.

Professor Ronan Daly, from Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing, leads the ‘Protein SPARK’ project, which will use proteins like tiny Lego bricks to grow magnets without rare-earth elements and advanced electrodes for batteries that hold more charge and last longer. 

The team’s ‘Droplet Lego’ method takes its inspiration from the way proteins direct biomineralisation – the process by which living organisms build hard materials like bones and teeth – and runs it on a continuous production line. 

Microscopic droplets carrying the designed proteins and elements will be sprayed and printed into position, much like inkjet printing. The proteins grow, guide and shape the constituent material into nanocrystals, films and three-dimensional structures, giving the team control over both the shape and the function as the material forms.

“Magnets are all around us, from headphones and mobile phones to motors and wind turbines,” said Daly. “Almost all magnets include rare-earth materials, which are costly to extract, are a diminishing resource and lead to significant environmental challenges. Our project, which is at its heart a manufacturing project, will instead use proteins to drive growth of useful magnetic materials without using rare earth materials anywhere. We will then look at how to apply this to other products, like new batteries that charge quickly and last longer.”

In addition to Daly, the team includes Professor Michael De Volder, Professor John Durrell and Dr Sebastian Pattinson from the Department of Engineering; Professor Ljiljana Fruk from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology; and Professor Tuomas Knowles from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry; as well as researchers from the University of Amsterdam and University of Liverpool. 

Cambridge researchers are also involved in two other projects in the Universal Fabricators Programme. 

Dr Shijing Sun and Dr Zuyang Ye from Cambridge’s Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy; and Professor Tuomas Knowles, Josie Forsythe, Hannah Han and Max Gao from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, are part of the Protein Organised Engineered Materials (POEM) project, which is led by the University of Washington and also involves colleagues from the University of Leeds. 

The POEM team are developing a new way to make high-performance magnets by using specially designed proteins to control how magnetic crystals grow and arrange themselves. This approach could produce more powerful and reliable magnets for future technologies by giving scientists precise control over the crystals’ size, shape and spacing.

“Using proteins as templates to assemble inorganic materials could open up new processes for making a next generation of rare-earth-free magnets,” said Sun. “Our team in Cambridge brings high-throughput methods to that search, so that protein design, materials chemistry and automated experimentation work together as one.”

Professor Erwin Reisner from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry is part of the S-LATTICE project, led by the University of Edinburgh. The S-LATTICE team are developing new materials by combining naturally self-assembling proteins with metals, creating large, highly ordered sheets that can be customised with properties not found in nature. These materials could be used for precise filtration, converting carbon dioxide into useful products, cleaner catalysis, and technologies that interact with light, all within a single platform.

The Universal Fabricators Programme is led by Ivan Jayapurna.