(127d) Leveraging Plant Nanobionics to Engineer the Next Generation of Phytoremediators

Widespread environmental contamination by heavy metals, perfluorinated compounds, and a host of other toxic organics—paired with the rapidly progressing climate crisis—necessitates sustainable soil and groundwater remediation schemes. The use of plants for phytoremediation is a carbon-negative, self-sustaining, and inexpensive approach to remove and transform nonpoint sources of environmental contamination. Despite these attractive features, phytoremediation is exceedingly time consuming due to slow kinetics or low levels of biomass production, limiting their practical application to low-value lands. Herein, we quantitatively evaluate the potential for nanotechnology to enable the next generation of phytoremediators by conferring non-native functions to plants via introduced nanomaterials. We first model contaminant accumulation in plants as fluidic resistors-in-series, comparing common, hypertolerant, and hyperaccumulating plants to elucidate the bottleneck for rapid sequestration. This approach for contaminant transport is then extended to nanoparticle (NP) uptake itself to parameterize the predicted outcome of using nanotechnologies to enhance the rate of contaminant uptake in plants. We apply a thermodynamic lipid-NP interaction model to quantify design parameters for increasing NP root-to-shoot translocation in plants. Our findings suggest an order-of-magnitude increase in contaminant uptake rate is possible with NP-mediated schemes. Plant nanobionics thus lends itself as an exciting technique to engineer high biomass, non-hyperaccumulating plants as fit-for-purpose, next-generation phytoremediators.