Research status of the rare and precious metals’ Materials Genome Initiative

The core philosophy of Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) is the transition of the way of new materials design from the traditional “trial-and-error” approach to the in-silico materials design approach which employs intensive computing and material informatics. In June 2011, President Barack Obama launched MGI alongside the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership to help businesses discover, develop and deploy new materials twice as fast. In this paper, the concept of rare and precious genome is presented first, followed by the progress of MGI. After that, we focus on the research status of the rare and precious metals’ MGI including the computational tools, the high-throughput experimental methodologies and the rare and precious metals database. We also introduce the application of MGI in the development of rare and precious metal materials, outline the remaining fundamental challenges and present an outlook on the future of the rare and precious metals’ MGI.