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Lutetium element Critical Material

Lutetium is the element Lu, represented here by its neutral-atom identity, distinct from dissolved Lu(III), chloride feed, host minerals and mixed rare-earth commodities. The United States designation refers to the named element in the Final 2025 List of Critical Minerals. A laboratory mixed-chloride experiment supports lutetium biosorption associated with washed Bacillus subtilis biomass; it does not establish a purified lutetium product or industrial recovery.

Identifiers & Classification

System Identifier Label
CHEBI CHEBI:33382 lutetium atom

Criticality Designations

Jurisdiction List Name Edition / Document Classification Source
United States Final 2025 List of Critical Minerals 2025; Federal Register notice of 7 November 2025 critical usgs_2025

Microbial & Biochemical Mechanisms (1)

Lutetium biosorption by washed Bacillus subtilis biomass in an acidic mixed-REE solution

biosorption Microbial

Associated Organisms: Bacillus subtilis (NCBITaxon:1423)

Washed, non-autoclaved B. subtilis ATCC 7003 biomass lowered the lutetium concentration of a synthetic eight-REE solution relative to simultaneous no-biomass controls. The eight-element arm in supplementary Table S1 reports 74% relative lutetium biosorption at both two and four hours. This percentage uses the contemporaneous control concentration as its denominator, not an isolated-product recovery or a fraction proven to be intracellular.

Experimental Context & Analytical Limits:
Table 1 identifies ATCC 7003, grown in FP medium at 30 degrees C and 120 rpm for two to four days. Section 2.2 reports harvested biomass washed twice in acidified water, then exposed at room temperature and pH 2.5 (HCl) to chloride salts of La, Ce, Nd, Gd, Dy, Er, Yb and Lu, each initially 15 micromol/L, with 5 g dry biomass/L. Samples were centrifuged and filtered through 0.2-micrometre nylon before ICP-MS. Assays and no-biomass controls were duplicated; independent culture derivation is unspecified. Control-relative depletion corrects for losses present without biomass, but cannot distinguish cell-surface adsorption, intracellular uptake and cell-associated precipitation. The authors call the untreated biomass living; viability during the acidic assay was not established here. The separate 4 g/L live-versus-autoclaved comparison is not the Table S1 condition. No Lu-specific desorption, purified product or industrial operation is demonstrated by this accepted arm.
Curated Evidence Points:
Table S1, experiment 2, Lu column, reports means of two parallel assays of 74% at two and four hours. Experiment 1 and Figure S1 contain La, Nd, Dy and Yb, without Lu; their biomass-loading and time patterns are not lutetium measurements. The percentage is calculated by the main paper's Section 2.2 formula (control minus sample)/control.
Methods 2.1–2.2, Table 1 and Figure 2a locate the ATCC 7003 preparation and the Lu-specific bar for the eight-REE, 5 g/L, two-hour assay. The pattern shows greater fractional depletion for Lu than the lighter members of this mixture, without establishing universal selectivity across different feeds or proving a particular binding ligand.
Figure 1 shows lower relative Lu biosorption at higher REE loading, while Figure 7 shows lower Lu depletion with autoclaved than untreated biomass under its separate 4 g/L conditions. Autoclaving changes cell integrity and does not by itself prove metabolically driven uptake. Section 3.1 explicitly leaves the dominant acidic-pH binding chemistry unresolved. Figure 4's separate Fe/Zr competition assay has different Lu percentages from Figure 2; its similar paired outcomes do not establish that all competing ions are harmless. The wastewater application concerns gadolinium, not lutetium.

Sources & References

  1. chebi_lutetium: ChEBI CHEBI:33382, lutetium atom; neutral Lu entity and lanthanoid relation
    https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/CHEBI:33382 (accessed 2026-10-11)
  2. usgs_2025: US Geological Survey (2025). Final 2025 List of Critical Minerals, Federal Register 90, 50494–50497, 7 November; named lutetium entry
    https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-11-07/html/2025-19813.htm (accessed 2026-10-11)
  3. breuker_2020: Breuker, Ritter and Schippers (2020). Biosorption of Rare Earth Elements by Different Microorganisms in Acidic Solutions. Metals 10, 954; Sections 2.1–2.2 and 3.1, Table 1, Figures 1–4 and 7
    https://doi.org/10.3390/met10070954 (accessed 2026-10-11)
  4. breuker_2020_supp: Breuker et al. (2020), supplementary material; Table S1 eight-REE experiment and Figures S1–S5
    https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/metals/metals-10-00954/article_deploy/metals-10-00954-s001.pdf (accessed 2026-10-11)
  5. atcc_7003: ATCC 7003, Bacillus subtilis, strain NRS 730; culture identity rather than experimental performance
    https://www.atcc.org/products/7003 (accessed 2026-10-11)
  6. ncbi_bsubtilis: NCBI Taxonomy 1423, Bacillus subtilis, species scope; does not identify ATCC 7003 uniquely
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi?id=1423 (accessed 2026-10-11)

Curation History

Timestamp Curator Action Summary
2026-10-11T07:54:11Z Codex (GPT-6; Codex) CREATE Added lutetium identity and US 2025 designation with the Lu-specific controlled mixed-solution biosorption assay; preserved live-biomass and quantitative limits.

Record source: data/records/lutetium.yaml