Team finds that biological nanofibrils can efficiently extract valuable metal elements from water

Many valuable metals like gold, silver, lithium and uranium are vital to high technology and modern industry. The terrestrial mineral reserves of these metals are generally very limited or suffer from high mining cost. Although most of these valuable metal ions could be found in the ocean, low-cost and high-efficiency adsorbents are still the key to the development of extracting these metals from seawater.