University of Sheffield researchers join ARIA Universal Fabricators programme
Researchers at Sheffield take on the challenge of developing scalable manufacturing processes that use proteins as the manufacturing tools to assemble advanced inorganic and composite materials.
- Led by Programme Director Ivan Jayapurna, ARIA’s Universal Fabricators programme is backed by £50m and will initially run for three years.
- 11 funded teams (R&D Creators) will take on the challenge of developing scalable manufacturing processes that use proteins as the manufacturing tools to assemble advanced inorganic and composite materials. Sheffield is leading one project and collaborating on another.
- The programme’s galvanising demonstration would be a scalable process that uses proteins to produce a high-value inorganic or composite material that outperforms the current industrial state of the art — proving that protein-programmed manufacturing can combine molecular precision with reliable, industrial-scale production.
One of the challenges the Universal Fabricators project hopes to address is developing high-performance rare-earth free permanent magnets. In order to transition away from critical supply-chain materials like neodymium and dysprosium, the project aims to unlock the magnetic potential of abundant elements (such as iron or cobalt) through precise nanostructuring. Theoretical candidates for these magnets (e.g.,cobalt ferrites and iron nitrides) exist, but they lose their magnetic properties if grains grow too large or are randomly oriented.
Synthetic chemistry can easily create inorganic nanopowders. However when we try to assemble these tiny particles into larger, solid objects they often clump together, break or lose the properties they were designed to do. Nature, however, has already solved this problem. For example bones and shells don’t just form from compressed random powder. Living organisms use soft proteins as natural molds to control how these hard minerals grow and structure themselves.
Dr Becky Boston, Senior Lecturer in Functional Ceramics, in the School Chemical, Materials and Biological Engineering, is leading the project, PROTEUS: PROtein-Templated Emergent Universal Synthesis which has received £4.8M in funding from ARIA.
Our goal is to harness the tremendous power and diversity of natural proteins to direct structure in functional oxides. ARIA has enabled us to assemble a truly interdisciplinary team and given us the resources to take an idea from exciting but fundamental science through to scalable production.”
Dr Becky Boston
PROTEUS: PROtein-Templated Emergent Universal Synthesis project bio
Becky and her team (Professor Chris Holland, Professor Conny Rodenburg and Dr Colin Freeman) aim to grow crystals and set them into ceramics at scale, using proteins that already exist in abundance in wool, silk, eggs and milk, much of it surplus from food and textile industries. Nature makes proteins that bind metal ions and guide minerals into precise structures, so the team's bet is that materials can be grown this way without designing proteins from scratch. Their method uses modelling and advanced characterisation to work out which natural protein functional groups bind metal ions, guide crystallisation, and control particle size, shape and spacing. Conventional manufacturing turns powder into a solid object using extreme heat, which destroys the fine structure the proteins have just built. By combining this protein-guided self-assembly with cold sintering instead, the team aims to press the resulting powder into a solid object at low temperatures, ensuring the fine nanoscale structure survives into the finished part. They will test this across increasingly complex oxide materials, starting with cobalt ferrite magnets, with strontium titanate thermoelectrics and yttrium barium copper oxide superconductors as alternative candidates. If it works, the result is a route to advanced ceramics grown from cheap feedstocks and consolidated without the heat that would undo them.
In a project being led by Imperial College London, Professor Kathy Christofidou and Professor Iain Todd, from the School of Chemical, Materials and Biological Engineering will be bringing their expertise in metallic materials manufacturing, interface design and magnetic synthesis to focus on using protein functionalisation to produce rare-earth-free magnets; they have received ~£750k funding from ARIA.
CADMUS: programming proteins from material blueprints to make rare-earth free magnets project bio
This project aims to build a protein-programmed manufacturing platform for rare-earth-free magnets. Designed proteins will act as nanoscale scaffolds, controlling where magnetic particles form or bind, their spacing and their three-dimensional organisation before these structures are converted into bulk magnetic materials. The team's bet is that tightly coupling computational protein design with selection-based directed evolution will accelerate the search for protein-mineral assemblies with the desired structure and magnetic performance. At the centre of their approach is ProteinCAD, a computational design framework linking protein geometry, mineral interfaces and manufacturing constraints. Those computational designs will be tested in rapid experimental selection cycles to discover mineral-binding proteins, with results feeding back into subsequent designs. Promising protein-mineral assemblies will be fixed, aligned and consolidated into bulk materials using scalable processing approaches. The team will start with magnetite and cobalt ferrite to establish the design-build-test-learn pipeline, then progress to higher-performance targets including tetrataenite (found in meteorites!) and iron nitride. By the end of the project, the team aims to demonstrate the platform in an application-testable rare-earth-free magnetic material at gram scale.