Nanofabrication of silk microneedles for high-throughput micronutrient delivery and continuous sap monitoring in plants.

Abstract

Biomaterials bridging the biotic-abiotic interface in plants offer the opportunity to precisely deliver agrochemicals and continuously monitor plant health, with the goals of increasing resilience to climate change, enhancing crop production and mitigating environmental impact. In this study we report the manipulation of silk fibroin assembly with inorganics nucleation at their phase front to nanomanufacture porous and hollow microneedles that can be interfaced with plants. Plant growth analysis and quantification of wounding gene expression show a non-significant systemic wounding response to the injection of silk microneedles in tomato plants. Microneedles with a hollow structure enable the systemic delivery of plant micronutrients to treat chlorosis in tomato plants and crop biofortification through transport of human micronutrients injected in the petiole and loaded into tomato fruits. Hollow microneedles also provide access to plant vasculature for sap sampling, enabling continuous monitoring and early detection of phytoaccumulation of environmental contaminants such as cadmium.

Code and data availability

The only authors' public code deposit is a Zenodo archive of molecular dynamics simulation scripts (silk peptide assembly with sodium/copper ions), explicitly linked in the Code Availability statement. It is computational analysis code from this paper, though it supports the MD modeling rather than the plant phenotypic