US lab’s ‘Spicy lambs’ protein system cuts rare-earth screening time from years to weeks

US scientists have built a high-throughput biological platform that could speed up the search for rare-earth separation materials, a key step in strengthening supply chains for electronics, batteries, and magnets. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are using naturally occurring bacterial proteins to isolate and study rare-earth elements. These proteins, known as lanmodulin, evolved in microbes that use rare-earth elements in their metabolism. The goal is to turn this biological capability into a scalable tool for industrial metal separation. But traditional protein screening methods are slow. Scientists typically test candidates one by one, making large-scale discovery impractical. A new platform developed at LLNL changes that process by enabling parallel screening of hundreds of protein variants in a single run. Spicy lambs system The method, published in Nature Chemical Biology, is called SpyTag-Catcher Immobilization of Lanmodulin for Assaying Metal-Binding Selectivity, or SpyCI-LAMBS, nicknamed “spicy lambs.” “It only took about a month to collect 600 proteins’ worth of data with this new assay,” said LLNL scientist and first author Patrick Diep. “It would have taken three to five years with the usual process.” The system works by attaching engineered tags to proteins so they can automatically bind to a solid surface, eliminating the need for complex purification steps that usually slow down experiments. Previous methods required researchers to extract proteins from bacterial mixtures containing thousands of other molecules, a process that significantly limited throughput. “We started by just saying, ‘one by one, let’s go through these lanmodulin proteins and test them.’ We made it through a handful of them and realized it would take us the rest of our lives to effectively characterize them all,” said LLNL scientist and senior author Dan Park. The new platform allows researchers to bypass that bottleneck entirely. Proteins at scale Usi…