Green Biosynthesis of Hybrid Cytochrome-Palladium Nanoparticles

Sustainable metal recovery and usage is an important part of the UK's plan towards a green economy and moving away from non-renewable resources. As part of this bacteria can be used to recover valuable metals from industrial waste by precipitating the soluble metals as nanoparticles on the surface of cell as a by-product of metabolism. We have taken this a step further by separating the proteins responsible for precipitation and allowing the formation of a nanoparticle on the surface of the protein.

This generates a novel hybrid protein-metal nanoparticle that has the potential for novel chemistry.

This project aims to understand how these nanoparticles are built on the protein surface, and develop techniques to control the growth. A wide range of biochemical and physical techniques such as spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, X-ray crystallography transmission- and cryo- electron microscopy will be used to characterise these hybrid particles and their ability to catalyse chemically important reactions will be explored.