When it comes to building a carbon-neutral future, we’re caught in a bind. Technologies like wind turbines and electric vehicles depend on critical metals: copper, nickel, and a host of rare earth elements with names that seem better suited to science fiction—neodymium, dysprosium. Yet these same metals are difficult and damaging to extract, often embedded in low-concentration deposits that traditional mining methods simply rip out with tremendous environmental cost.

At Cornell University, a team of scientists is attempting something almost magical: creating an atlas that catalogs the microbes capable of dissolving minerals and releasing these critical metals without the scorched-earth effects of traditional mining. With a three-year, $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the researchers aim to map how different microorganisms and their genes interact with mineral deposits. It’s a bold project that could offer a revolutionary alternative—one that uses biology, not brute force, to tease metals from rocks.

Microbial Alchemy: Mapping the DNA of Nature’s Hidden Chemists

The leader of the project, Buz Barstow, an assistant professor of biological and environmental engineering, is quick to acknowledge the project’s ambition. “The atlas will look at microorganisms in geological environments and figure out what genes are there and what they’re doing,” he says. “It’s an atlas, yes, but it also has an oracle aspect, where it will show us the genetic engineering needed to make these microbes better at weathering minerals to access critical elements.”

For the last few decades, scientists have been slowly realizing that microbes are nature’s chemists, capable of doing things that sound like magic: dissolving gold from ore, separating copper from rock. The scientific term for this is “biomining.” However, no known microbe is capable of mining the elements necessary for renewable energy on a commercial scale. The Cornell team hopes to change that.

Collaboration Across Disciplines: Science and Policy Meet

Barstow isn’t working alone. The project spans multiple disciplines, uniting an eclectic group of scientists: Esteban Gazel, an earth and atmospheric scientist; Sarah Kreps, a professor of government and policy; Christopher Mason, a physiologist and biophysicist from Weill Cornell Medicine; and Matthew Schrenk, an expert in earth and environmental sciences from Michigan State University. It’s the kind of multidisciplinary collaboration that universities love to champion, but it’s also more than that—it’s a collective leap into the unknown.

The origin story of this collaboration goes back to 2018, at an event hosted by Cornell’s Atkinson Center for Sustainability. Barstow and Gazel found themselves discussing how to harness microbes to coax metals from rock. Both Cornell faculty fellows they had come to the idea from different angles: Barstow, with a background in synthetic biology, was interested in redesigning organisms to solve environmental problems; Gazel, aware of the environmental toll of mining, had already been exploring how biology influences mineral dissolution. They began to wonder: What if they could combine their expertise to train microbes to help build a greener world?

“That’s where the idea started,” Gazel recalls, “in prospecting the world for extreme environments where minerals are dissolving naturally. If bacteria are part of that process, maybe we can learn from them and then make them better.”

Building Public Trust and Engaging the Next Generation

To truly transform mining, the researchers must understand not just which microbes can help but also how to cultivate them and, more ambitiously, how to modify their genetic material to make them adept at dissolving specific minerals. This is where the atlas comes in. By mapping the genetic landscape of mineral-dissolving microbes, they hope to create an open source of information, a guide that will eventually help them breed—or even genetically engineer—microorganisms to “mine” sustainably.

Of course, understanding the science is only one part of the challenge. As Kreps, director of Cornell’s Tech Policy Institute, explains, introducing genetically modified organisms into mining brings a host of legal, ethical, and public concerns. “You can come up with the most technically sound idea,” she says, “but if society is repulsed by it, or if the legal environment isn’t amenable, it doesn’t matter.” Her job, she says, is to bridge the gap between science and policy, making sure the technology is understood and accepted by the public.

Barstow agrees that public perception is key. “We want the public to feel good about this,” he says. Mining, after all, has a brutal reputation, and rightly so. Convincing people that biomining can be a humane alternative will take time—and perhaps more outreach than scientists are used to.

As part of the project, the team has partnered with the Paleontological Research Institution to offer a course for high school students. The goal isn’t only to teach students about biomining; it’s to give them a working understanding of genetic engineering so that they don’t immediately dismiss it as Frankenstein science. “By exposing them to these ideas early on, we hope to take some of the fear out of it,” Barstow says.

In three years, if the project yields promising results, the team hopes to expand their efforts. They’ve already outlined a grander plan that would involve as many as 22 principal investigators across 11 universities in four countries, with scientists like Pelin Demirel at Imperial College London and Louise Horsfall at the University of Edinburgh. Together, they would be poised to create an atlas that could transform mining across the globe.

At the heart of this endeavor is the hope that by decoding the language of microbes, we can shift away from the brute-force mining methods that have scarred landscapes and poisoned water systems. Biomining is a vision of mining where nature, rather than machinery, takes the lead—a vision that, if realized, could prove to be as revolutionary as the shift to renewable energy itself. In the mineral-rich rocks of our world, we may find answers that, up until now, were hidden just beyond our reach.