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A new manuscript by Jung, Abeyrathna, Su and Banta was published in ACS Synthetic Biology.  This manuscript describes the overexpression and CRISPR-mediated knockdown of the magA gene in A. ferrooxidans. MagA overexpression increased magnetosome production, magnetic responsiveness, and increased pyrite bioleaching.  

Four presentations from the Banta Lab were given at the 2026 American Chemical Society Annual Meeting in Atlanta, GA.  Mallori Herishko gave a presentation entitled "Engineering quorum sensing pathways for programmable microbial communities in biomining​​​​​​​". Wei Wang gave a presentation entitled “Decoding biological lanthanide selectivity: Kinetic control dictates meta ion recognition and separations by proteins”.

A new manuscript by Khoury, Abeyrathna, Herishko, Hu, Wang, Kumar, Dailey, Heater, Kucharzyk and Banta was published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.  This manuscript describes the development of a Phage Assisted Continuous Evolution (PACE) platform for the evolution of a rare earth element binding peptide. The evolved mutations introduced hydrogen bonds and stabilized the peptide enabling single-stage chelator free chromatographic separation of lanthanide ions.