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This project aims to support biotechnology innovation in the Canadian mining industry. It has a long-term goal of finding a way to extract copper from mining waste. Successfully doing so will help us meet the growing need for sustainable copper, which is crucial for reaching climate action goals and building a green economy.  

New high-quality copper deposits are rare, hard to find and expensive to develop. Accordingly, the global annual copper supply gap is expected to reach 9.7 million tonnes by 2030. Meanwhile, more than 43 million tonnes of residual copper are estimated to be left in mine tailing sites worldwide. Mine tailings are collected piles of waste rocks left over from mining activity. If this copper from waste sources can be harvested efficiently, it could address the supply gap.  

This has prompted the mining industry to explore microbial solutions to extract metals from waste streams. Some microbes, such as sulfate-reducing bacteria, have been shown to precipitate copper, meaning they cause the copper to cluster together, which would make it easier to sort useful copper from the rest of the mining waste. However, the effectiveness of these microbes is hindered by their sensitivity to pH and high copper concentrations.  

In this two-year project, researchers from the University of British Columbia, Teck, Rio Tinto and Koonkie aim to discover and validate new microbes that have the potential to recover copper from mine waste streams. The project will use the Mining Microbiome Analytics Platform (MMAP) to assess the genetic diversity of microbial communities in waste streams from two different copper mines. The researchers will target microbes that thrive in high-copper environments to identify genes and metabolic pathways related to copper binding, transport or tolerance in natural and enriched communities of bacteria. In addition, the team will develop a cell surface display screening platform to validate the copper-binding capabilities of the copper-binding proteins identified during this project.  

If successful, the new understanding of metabolic pathways and the discovery of new copper-binding proteins will provide promising options that may be scaled-up in the future.