Workshop Setup Break

Monitoring the flux of solutes and ions across plant cell membranes through ion channels and transporters embedded within them is a significant challenge today, but is fundamental for assigning function to unknown transporter genes, tackling transporter substrate specificities and modes of regulation, and eventually linking metabolic pathways to cellular compartments, plant growth and development, and bridging the genotype to phenotype gap. Today's technologies are inadequate for a number of reasons, including low throughput and lack of sensitivity, especially for transporters, which have fluxes several orders of magnitude lower than ion channels. In addition, some transporters reside in intracellular organelle membranes and are especially hard to access. In this presentation, I will share a new technology that combines planar green plant membranes with a transparent, electrically conducting polymer, comprising a “plant membrane on a chip” for the dual-mode (optical or electrical) measurement of plant protein functions. This new kind of sensor device is amenable to scale up for multiplexed for collection of large data sets on plant transporter systems in a way that has not been possible before. With this capability, such large data sets will feed into big data science approaches for enabling discoveries and breakthroughs in our understanding of how plants adapt to genetic perturbations, extreme weather conditions, pathogen pressures, and other critical aspects important for flourishing ecosystems.