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

迫切需要以对环境负责的方式提高美国农业对压力和疾病的适应能力。新兴的植物纳米生物技术领域可以帮助缓解植物压力，使农业更具弹性和效率。与人类体内的药物输送类似，向植物输送纳米级农用化学品将需要更好地了解纳米材料的性质如何影响其在叶子中的吸收，以及它在叶子和植物中的移动。该项目将确定如何调整纳米材料的性能，使其能够穿过叶子表面，进入叶子组织，并与叶子中选定的目标位置共同定位。能够以所需的速度、位置和剂量将纳米材料输送到植物中以缓解作物压力，将导致社会管理农业的方式发生范式转变，以可持续地满足不断增长的人口的需求。该项目将培养一名博士后研究员和两名博士生，并将为六名本科生提供研究经验。研究人员将建立一个植物纳米生物技术研究人员的国际社区，使学生能够在农业方面提供急需的创新。这个合作项目汇集了几个科学学科(聚合物和纳米化学、纳米技术和植物生物学)的想法，以阐明工程纳米材料的性质如何影响植物叶片-纳米颗粒的相互作用，并促进纳米颗粒进入植物的维管系统(韧皮部)和叶片的光合作用细胞器。PI将能够以超高的空间和时间分辨率可视化小麦和棉花叶片对尺寸和表面化学可调的荧光金属掺杂碳点的吸收。利用一套独特的高分辨率同步X射线荧光显微镜和新的共聚焦荧光显微镜方法，PI将阐明这些纳米材料与韧皮部和叶绿体的运输路径和关联。PI将使用靶向肽序列将这些纳米颗粒引导到两个截然不同的叶解剖结构中的叶绿体和韧皮部；单子叶和双子叶。这将产生前所未有的数据集，用于开发新的n维叶-纳米颗粒相互作用模型，以基于纳米颗粒的结构和表面化学性质(包括电荷、尺寸、涂层疏水性和靶向肽序列)来预测纳米颗粒的吸收和移位行为。这些模型将能够设计和合成新颖的、可扩展的和生物兼容的叶面输送平台，用于将纳米启用的营养物质和抗氧化疗法输送到植物中的特定位置。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.