This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: For too long, the United States has relied on foreign sources for most of the raw materials powering its technological future: the essential minerals in every smartphone, battery pack and semiconductor. What if one answer to the supply crisis isn't buried in a mine shaft but growing quietly in a field?
Scientists are betting on a resource-efficient, highly effective strategy: using engineered plants and symbiotic microbes to absorb critical minerals directly from the Earth in a process called phytomining. At the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), researchers have created an agentic artificial intelligence system that is proving to be a powerful ally in the race to develop crops that act like living sponges, selectively hyperaccumulating critical minerals from the soil until they are harvested and processed to recover the valuable metals. The co-scientist agentic AI platform harnesses the Frontier supercomputer to train, fine-tune and generate output for the Orchestrated Platform for Autonomous Laboratories (OPAL) project, a multilaboratory initiative of DOE's Genesis Mission.
The Genesis Mission is a national initiative to build the world's most powerful scientific platform to accelerate discovery science, strengthen national security and drive energy innovation. OPAL partners include Oak Ridge, Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley and Pacific Northwest national laboratories. The project combines AI, robotics and automated experimentation to create an interconnected network of labs that learns, adapts and accelerates breakthroughs across biology, biotechnology and energy science.
ORNL researchers' initial focus is biodesign for critical minerals and materials recovery. Proactively sharing and integrating AI-ready data, models and agents to guide experiments at the four labs can significantly speed experimentation and time to analysis for faster solutions. With the OPAL co-scientist, ORNL researchers conducting an experiment on the ability of plants to absorb nickel were able to reduce the time to analyze more than 1,000 physical plant traits from hundreds of hours of manual labor to a few minutes of interaction with the AI agent.
Growing and harvesting plants that naturally take up critical materials such as nickel, cobalt, selenium and rare earth elements from the soil is attractive as a low-cost, minimally intrusive method to strengthen rural economies and shore up domestic supply chains of resources for energy and national security. Phytomining is not a new concept. Plants have been used for years to help remediate soils at former industrial and mining sites.
It is ideal for areas with large, low-grade mineral deposits unsuitable for conventional mining or growing food crops. Deployment is aimed at rural areas with marginal lands, warmer regions where plants grow larger faster, and rehabilitation zones for existing or planned mining operations. ORNL researchers investigated how 12 unique lines of the pennycress plant collected from varied growing regions around the world accumulated nickel.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
