To sustainably meet the demands for food, energy, and biopharmaceuticals of a rapidly growing global population will require novel and convergent approaches to enhance and augment plant function. Nanotechnology is enabling the development of targeted, controllable, and species independent tools for plant bioengineering. This talk will discuss nanotechnology approaches for highly efficient delivery of agrochemicals in plants, targeted delivery of plasmid DNA for plant bioengineering, and nanosensors that communicate with electronic devices for monitoring plant health. To achieve these goals we focus on chloroplasts, key organelles for bioengineering due to their critical roles in plant biology including photosynthesis, signaling, nutrient assimilation, and biomanufacturing of drugs and biofuels. These semi-autonomous organelles have a small prokaryotic-like genome, their own transcription and translation machinery, and lack gene silencing mechanisms that enable high expression of transgenes. Rational designs of nanomaterial properties such as charge, size, and coatings with guiding peptide recognition motifs enable targeted delivery of chemicals and plasmid DNA in up to 80% of chloroplasts in leaf cells. This approach allows more precise and tunable changes in chloroplast function <i>in vivo</i> in wildtype plants for diverse applications, including improvement of plant photosynthesis, stress tolerance, and nutrient delivery, as well as plant biomanufacturing. High spatiotemporal resolution nanosensors that communicate with electronic devices also provide species independent tools for understanding plant cell signaling and monitoring plant health. Targeted delivery of nanomaterials with chemical and biomolecule cargoes, and plant nanosensors, are emerging tools with a broad range of applications for the next generation of plant biology research, bioengineering, and nano-enabled agriculture.

Nanoengineering for precision agriculture and plant biomanufacturing

ACS Spring 2022

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