Precision Delivery of Multi-Scale Payloads to Tissue-Specific Targets in Plants
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Cao_ycao_PhD_CEE_2022.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
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6.54 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
c770d858be053fef9b7e9b2a52a7aff5
Author(s)
Cao, Yunteng
Advisor(s)
Marelli, Benedetto
Date Issued
September 2022
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Agrochemicals delivery is of crucial importance in modern agriculture to ensure the healthy growth of crops and productivity, therefore food security, particularly under current pressures, including escalating growing conditions associated with climate change (e.g., extreme weather, the spread of plant diseases and pests, lower soil quality), an ever-increasing human population, scarcity of arable land, and limited resources. However, conventional practices suffer from low efficiency and significant payload loss to the environment, conflicting with societal and environmental sustainability requirements. Therefore, there is a dire need for new techniques for precise, efficient delivery.
This thesis studies the use of biomaterials and drug delivery principles to engineer the precise deployment of payloads in plants. Specifically, the thesis designs a novel silk-based biomaterial and fabricates a microneedle-like device capable of delivering a variety of payloads ranging from small molecules to large proteins into specific loci of various plant tissues. Precisely sampling plant sap is also demonstrated by tuning the material composition. Silk-based microneedles further show minimal wounding responses, activation of gibberellic acid (GA₃) responses post-injection of GA₃-loaded microneedles, and promotion of bolting and inhibition flower formation by GA₃ on Arabidopsis thaliana mutant ft-10. This method is proved to be more efficient and effective in delivering GA₃ than foliar spray. Potential applications of silk-based microneedles in agriculture are also confirmed by the successful deployment of GA₃ in several crops. In addition, hollow microneedles are fabricated using silk fibroin assembly and inorganic nucleation at their phase fronts, providing new tools to bridge the biotic/abiotic interface by interrogating pathways for biomolecules transport in plants and enabling early-stage detection of bioaccumulation of environmental contaminants, such as cadmium and arsenic.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
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