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Nitroaromatic detection and infrared communication from wild-type plants using plant nanobionics

Abstract

Plant nanobionics aims to embed non-native functions to plants by interfacing them with specifically designed nanoparticles. Here, we demonstrate that living spinach plants (Spinacia oleracea) can be engineered to serve as self-powered pre-concentrators and autosamplers of analytes in ambient groundwater and as infrared communication platforms that can send information to a smartphone. The plants employ a pair of near-infrared fluorescent nanosensors—single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) conjugated to the peptide Bombolitin II to recognize nitroaromatics via infrared fluorescent emission, and polyvinyl-alcohol functionalized SWCNTs that act as an invariant reference signal—embedded within the plant leaf mesophyll. As contaminant nitroaromatics are transported up the roots and stem into leaf tissues, they accumulate in the mesophyll, resulting in relative changes in emission intensity. The real-time monitoring of embedded SWCNT sensors also allows residence times in the roots, stems and leaves to be estimated, calculated to be 8.3 min (combined residence times of root and stem) and 1.9 min mm−1 leaf, respectively. These results demonstrate the ability of living, wild-type plants to function as chemical monitors of groundwater and communication devices to external electronics at standoff distances.

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Figure 1: Nitroaromatic detection and infrared communication in wild-type plants via plant nanobionics.
Figure 2: Standoff detection of picric acid using a nanobionic spinach plant.
Figure 3: Monitoring of B-SWCNT/P-SWCNT nIR intensity ratio (B-SWCNT/P-SWCNT) enables detection of picric acid by nanobionic plants.
Figure 4: nIR response of B-SWCNTs and P-SWCNTs to picric acid deposited on the lamina of a spinach leaf.

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Amar K. Mohanty, Singaravelu Vivekanandhan, … Manjusri Misra

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Acknowledgements

The nitroaromatic detection work using B-SWCNTs and P-SWCNTs were supported by the US Army Research Office under contract W911NF-13-D-0001. The graphene work was supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences under Award grant number DE-FG02-08ER46488 Mod 0008. M.H.W. is supported on a graduate fellowship by the Agency of Science, Research and Technology Singapore. J.P.G. was supported by National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology under Grant No. 1103600. V.B.K. is supported by The Swiss National Science Foundation (project No. P2ELP3_162149). The authors wish to thank Melanie Gronick (MIT media) for her invaluable assistance in producing the Supplementary Movie 3 and also G. Verma for helpful discussions.

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M.H.W., J.P.G. and M.S.S. conceived experiments and wrote the paper. M.H.W., J.P.G. and M.S.S. performed experiments and data analysis. S.-Y.K. and R.S. assisted in standoff experimental set-up and analysis. M.H.W., V.B.K. and P.L. performed graphene transfer experiments. G.B. and T.T.S.L. assisted in data analysis. All authors have given their approval to the final version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Michael S. Strano.

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Wong, M., Giraldo, J., Kwak, SY. et al. Nitroaromatic detection and infrared communication from wild-type plants using plant nanobionics. Nature Mater 16, 264–272 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4771

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