Collaborative Research: Elucidating nanoparticle-plant leaf interactions for designing foliar-applied agrochemicals

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There is a critical need to improve the resiliency of U.S. agriculture against stress and disease in an environmentally responsible manner. The emerging field of plant nanobiotechnology can help to mitigate plant stress and make agriculture more resilient and efficient. Similar to drug delivery in humans, delivering nano-sized agrochemicals to plants will require better understanding of how the nanomaterial's properties influence its uptake into the leaves, and its movement through the leaf and plant. This project will determine how to tune nanomaterial properties to allow them to cross the leaf surface, enter leaf tissues, and co-locate with selected target locations in the leaf. The ability to deliver nanomaterials into plants at the required rate, location, and dose for mitigating crop stresses will lead to a paradigm shift in the way society manages agriculture to sustainably meet the demands of a growing population. The project will train one post-doctoral researcher and two PhD students, and will provide research experiences for six undergraduate researchers. The investigators will build an international community of plant nanobiotechnology researchers and enable students to provide much-needed innovation in agriculture.This collaborative project converges ideas from several scientific disciplines (polymer- and nano-chemistry, nanotechnology, and plant biology) to elucidate how the properties of engineered nanomaterials affect plant leaf-nanoparticle interactions, nd promote delivery of nanoparticles into the plant vasculature (phloem) and leaf photosynthetic organelles. The PIs will enable visualization of uptake of fluorescent metal doped Carbon-dots with tunable size and surface chemistry into wheat and cotton leaves at ultra-high spatial and temporal resolution. Using a unique suite of high-resolution synchrotron X-ray fluorescence microscopy and novel confocal fluorescence microscopy approaches, the PIs will elucidate transport pathways and associations of these nanomaterials with phloem and chloroplasts. The PIs will use targeting peptide sequences to guide these nanoparticles to chloroplasts and phloem in two contrasting leaf anatomies; monocots and dicots. This will generate unprecedented data sets that are used to develop novel n-dimensional leaf-nanoparticle interaction models to predict the uptake and translocation behavior for nanoparticles based on their structural and surface chemistry properties including charge, size, coating hydrophobicity, and targeting peptide sequences. These models will enable the design and synthesis of novel, scalable, and biocompatible, foliar delivery platforms for delivering nano-enabled nutrients and antioxidant therapeutics to specific locations in plants.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.