Gigatonne Bio
Project Overview
University
Year
About
Mining leaves vast quantities of crushed waste rock containing unrecovered valuable metals and capable of contaminating surrounding land and water. Gigatonne Bio uses genetically engineered bacteria that release organic acids to dissolve this material, freeing nickel, cobalt and platinum-group metals. The process also releases magnesium, which reacts with carbon dioxide to form stable magnesite, storing the carbon permanently. Tested in a bioreactor, the approach could recover additional resources, reduce hazardous tailings and combine critical-mineral production with long-term carbon removal.
Team
Alia Almansoori
Alia Almansoori is a co-founder of Gigatonne Bio, a deep tech startup engineering microbes to bioleach critical metals from mine tailings while permanently sequestering CO2. She's currently a PhD student at Cornell University and holds a bachelor's in molecular biology from the University of Edinburgh. She was the 2018 winner of Genes in Space and sent her experiment to the International Space Station. That same instinct for engineering biology to survive and perform in extreme, resource-constrained environments now drives her work turning mine tailings into a source of critical metals and durable carbon storage.