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Nanotechnology Enabled Precision Delivery for Sustainable Agriculture
Plants possess 80% of global biomass and supply the planet with food, energy and materials that maintain the operation of our society. We aim to maximize and harness the productivity of plants by interfacing them with functional nanomaterials. We develop polymers and biopolymers based nanocarrier platform that deliver a wide variety of small molecules (nutrients and hormones) and biomacromolecules (proteins and nucleic acids) to plants in efficient and targeted manor. The delivered payloads have facilitate plant engineering and promoted desired plant functions, including stress resilience, enhanced photosynthesis and stress sensing. These efforts can tackle critical aspects of our society, to establish more resilient and sustainable infrastructures.
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Understanding Nanocarrier to Plant Interactions
Nanocarriers enabled foliar agrochemical delivery and systemic transport holds significant potential to offer transformative solution to improving global food security. It can facilitate agrochemical delivery to plants in an efficient and targeted manner. However, nanocarriers leaf uptake and subsequent transport pathways in plants remain unclear. We investigate the fundamental transport pathways of nanocarriers to identify the barriers that hinder their delivery in plants. This knowledge can guide nanocarrier designs that promote agent delivery to designated plant organs to fully realize the beneficial effect of delivered agrochemicals.
Featured publications:
Biopolymer Derived Hierarchical Nanomaterials for Emerging Contaminant Remediation.
Emerging contaminants, including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have become a global concern to environmental and public health. Production of current PFAS sorbents require intensive synthesis conditions (e.g. high temperature) and toxic reagents that can cause heavy environmental burden when implemented at scale. We upcycle structural biopolymers from agricultural and textile wastes and implement scalable and low energy material fabrication techniques (e.g. self assembly) to develop renewable, scalable, and cost-effective nanofibrils capable of scavenging emerging contaminants from water and food systems.
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