Interfacing living plants with nanomaterials for in planta sensing and plant biotechnology applications

Plants represent an important biological system which can self-repair, grow autonomously and generate energy from sunlight and photosynthesis. As sessile organisms, they have evolved complex internal and inter-organism signaling pathways with distinct structures to thrive in ever-changing and at times unpredictable conditions. While humans have used plants as a source of food and raw materials for millenia, we have only considered living plants as a technology in recent years. A major advance in this area is the emergence of plant nanobionics, a field which interfaces living plants with nanotechnology to impart the former with novel and non-native functionalities. The broad vision of plant nanobionics is to use rationally-designed nanoparticles to engineer a wide array of plant-based technologies, not genetically limited to specific plant species, to potentially replace the myriad devices in our everyday lives stamped out of plastic, containing circuit boards and consuming power from the electrical grid. Nanomaterials are ideal candidates for interfacing with plants due to their unique physical and electronic properties, which can be rationally modified to complement and augment the biological properties of living plants. In addition, engineered nanomaterials can serve as nanocarriers to deliver biomolecular cargo, as well as nanosensors to translate the invisible plant internal signaling into an optical readout easily interpreted by portable electronics.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Salim Lew, Tedrick Thomas.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Michael S. Strano.

• Chemical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/146710

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/146710