Cell walls are a unifying feature of plants and a key barrier limiting nanoparticle uptake into plant cells. Herein, we systematically investigated the influence of nanoparticle surface charge on the interactions with chemically heterogeneous plant cell walls. We assessed the interactions of fluorescent carbon dots (CDs) with positive, neutral, and negative zeta potentials with model plant cell wall surfaces composed of cellulose or pectin. Our results based on confocal fluorescence microscopy imaging, XPS, FTIR, and QCM-D indicate that the interaction between plant cell walls and nanoparticles is dominated by electrostatic interactions. The positively charged CDs have the strongest affinity to plant cell walls, which is dominated by the electrostatic interaction between the surface amine groups of CDs and the carboxyl groups of pectin, while CDs with negative or neutral zeta potential exhibit negligible interactions with plant cell walls. We validated our analysis based on interactions of CDs with model plant cell wall surfaces in isolated native cell walls of land plants (<i>Arabidopsis</i>) and green algae (<i>Coleochaete</i>). This study provides insight into nanoparticle surface charge design for optimizing delivery into crop plants and contributes to improve our understanding of nanoparticle interactions with plant biosurfaces in the environment.

Interactions of carbon dots with plant cell walls

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.