Roberson Receives Awards to Apply Seaweeds to Industrial Sustainability

Six cross-disciplinary teams of researchers, including MBL Associate Scientist Loretta Roberson, have received awards in the first year of Scialog: Sustainable Minerals, Metals, and Materials, a three-year initiative that aims to spark advances in the mining, design, manufacture, and disposal of materials needed to achieve a more sustainable and low-carbon energy system. The awards are sponsored by Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and The Kavli Foundation.

Roberson is a member of two of the funded teams, both of which incorporate seaweeds to address sustainability in the mining and textile industries. Each scientist receives $60,000 in direct costs their part of each team project.

Roberson’s first project is “Seaweed for Critical Element Extraction and Transformation (SeaCrEET),” with team members Nicholas Rolston of Arizona State University and Julian West of Rice University. Seaweeds have immense potential to transform the extraction and recovery of critical elements while also treating contaminated wastewater. However, this potential is hindered by limited knowledge across various scales—from molecular to organismal—about the mechanisms behind element accumulation, localization in the seaweed, and the factors influencing seaweed growth in such challenging environments. This research will answer these questions to enhance our ability to effectively deploy seaweeds in critical element-contaminated areas, enabling the integrated bioremediation and harvesting of these elements.

Her second Scialog project is “Engineering Plants and Algae as Dye-Free Alternatives to Fossil-Based Textiles,” along with Helen Zha, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Jaime Barros-Rios, University of Missouri. This project seeks to revolutionize plant and algae materials for textile applications by "bioalloying" them with recombinant proteins at the molecular level. These recombinant proteins, inspired by coral chromoproteins, provide inherent color, eliminating the need for additional dyeing processes. These proteins will be engineered for direct expression by the host plant or seaweed to provide biodegradable and sustainable alternatives to traditional fossil fuel-based textiles and eliminates the need for environmentally harmful dyeing processes.

The inaugural Scialog conference, held September 4-7 in Tucson, Arizona, engaged more than 50 Fellows selected from multiple disciplines, approaches and methodologies in a series of conversations designed to build a networked community, discuss challenges and gaps in current knowledge, and form teams to propose high-risk, high-reward projects based on ideas they develop during the conference.