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      in Environment

      Podcast: Curiosity Unbounded, Episode 1 — How a free-range kid from Maine is helping green-up industrial practices

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      The Curiosity Unbounded podcast is a conversation between MIT President Sally Kornbluth and newly-tenured faculty members. President Kornbluth invites us to listen in as she dives into the research happening in MIT’s labs and in the field. Along the way, she and her guests discuss pressing issues, as well as what inspires the people running at the world’s toughest challenges at one of the most innovative institutions on the planet.

      In this episode, President Kornbluth sits down with Desirée Plata, a newly tenured associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. Her work focuses on making industrial processes more environmentally friendly, and removing methane — a key factor in global warming — from the air.

      FULL TRANSCRIPT:

      Sally Kornbluth: Hello, I’m Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, and I’m thrilled to welcome you to this MIT community podcast, Curiosity Unbounded. In my first few months at MIT, I’ve been particularly inspired by talking with members of our faculty who recently earned tenure. Like their colleagues, they are pushing the boundaries of knowledge. Their passion and brilliance, their boundless curiosity, offer a wonderful glimpse of the future of MIT.

      Today, I’m talking with Desirée Plata, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. Desirée’s work is focused on predicting the environmental impact of  industrial processes and translating that research to real-world technologies. She describes herself as an environmental chemist. Tell me a little more about that. What led you to this work either personally or professionally?

      Desirée Plata: I guess I always loved chemistry, but before that, I was just a kid growing up in the state of Maine. I like to describe myself as a free-range kid. I ran around and talked to the neighbors and popped into the local businesses. One thing I observed in my grandparents’ town was that there were a whole lot of sick people. Not everybody, but maybe every other house. I remember being about seven or eight years old and driving home with my mom to our apartment one day and saying, “It’s got to be something everybody shares. The water, maybe something in the food or the air.” That was really my first environmental hypothesis.

      Sally: You had curiosity unbounded even when you were a child. 

      Desirée: That’s right. I spent the next several decades trying to figure it out and ultimately discovered that there was something in the water where my grandmother lived. In that time, I had earned a chemistry degree and came to MIT to do my grad work at MIT in the Woods Hole Oceanographic in environmental chemistry and chemical oceanography.

      Sally: You saw a pattern, you thought about it, and it took some time to get the tools to actually address the questions, but eventually you were there. That is great. As I understand it, you have two distinct areas of interest. One is getting methane out of the atmosphere to mitigate climate warming, and the other is making industrial processes more environmentally sound. Do you see these two as naturally connected?

      Desirée: I’ll start by saying that when I was young and thinking about this chemical contamination that I hypothesized was there in my grandmother’s neighborhood, one of the things—when I finally found out there was a Superfund site there—one of the things I discovered was that it was owned by close family friends. They were our neighbors. The decisions that they made as part of their industrial practice were just part of standard operating procedure. That’s when it clicked for me that industry is just going along, hoping to innovate to make the world a better place. When these environmental impacts occur, it’s often because they didn’t have enough information or know the right questions to ask. I was in graduate school at the time and said, “I’m at one of the most innovative places on planet Earth. I want to go knock on the doors of other labs and say, ‘What are you making and how can I help you make it better?'”

      If we all flash back to around 2008 or so, hydraulic fracturing was really taking off in this country and there was a lot of hypotheses about the number of chemicals being used in that process. It turns out that there are many hundreds of chemicals being used in the hydraulic fracturing process. My group has done an immense amount of work to study every groundwater we could get our hands on across the Appalachian region of the eastern United States, which is where a lot of this development took place and is still taking place. One of the things we discovered was that some of the biggest environmental impacts are actually not from the injected chemicals but from the released methane that’s coming into the atmosphere. Methane is growing at an exorbitant rate and is responsible for about as much warming as CO2 over the next 10 years. I started realizing that we, as engineers and scientists, would need a way to get these emissions back. To take them back from the atmosphere, if you will. To abate methane at very dilute concentrations. That’s what led to my work in methane abatement and methane mitigation.

      Sally: Interesting. Am I wrong about when we think about the impact of agriculture on the environment, that methane is a big piece of that as well?

      Desirée: You are certainly not wrong there. If you look at anthropogenic emissions or human-derived emissions, more than half are associated with agricultural practices. The cultivation of meat and dairy in particular. Cows and sheep are what are known as enteric methane formers. Part of their digestion process actually leads to the formation of methane. It’s estimated that about 28% of the global methane cycle is associated with enteric methane formers in our agricultural practices as humans. There’s another 18% that’s associated with fossil energy extraction.

      Sally: That’s really interesting. Thinking about your work then, particularly in agriculture, part of the equation has got to be how people live, what they eat, and production of methane as part of the sustainability of agriculture. The other part then seems to be how you actually, if you will, mitigate what we’ve already bought in terms of methane in the environment.

      Desirée: Yes, this is a really important topic right now.

      Sally: Tell me a little bit about, maybe in semi-lay terms, about how you think about removal of methane from the environment.

      Desirée: Recently, over 120 countries signed something called the Global Methane Pledge, which is essentially a pledge to reduce 45% of methane emissions by 2030. If you can do that, you can save about 0.5 degree centigrade warming by 2100. That’s a full third of the 1.5 degrees that politicians speak about. We can argue about whether or not that’s really the full extent of the warming we’ll see, but the point is that methane impacts near-term warming in our lifetimes. It’s one of the unique greenhouse gases that can do that.

      It’s called a short-lived climate pollutant. What that means is that it lives in the atmosphere for about 12 years before it’s removed. That means if you take it out of the atmosphere, you’re going to have a rapid reduction in the total warming of planet Earth, the total radiative forcing. Your question more specifically was about, how do we grapple with this? We’ve already omitted so much methane. How do we think about, as technologists, getting it back? It’s a really hard problem, actually. In the air in the room in front of us that we’re breathing, only two of the million molecules in front of us are methane. 417 or so are CO2. If you think direct air capture of CO2 is hard, direct air capture of methane is that much harder.

      The other thing that makes methane a challenge to abate is that activating the bonds in methane to promote its destruction or its removal is really, really tricky. It’s one of the smallest carbon-based molecules. It doesn’t have what we call “Van der Waals interactions”—there are no handles to grab onto. It’s not polar. That first destruction and that first C-H bond is what we as chemists would call “spin forbidden”. It’s hard to do and it takes a lot of energy to do that. One of the things we’ve developed in my lab is a catalyst that’s based on earth-abundant materials. There are some other groups at MIT that also work on these same types of materials. It’s able to convert methane at very low levels, down to the levels that we’re breathing in this room right now.

      Sally: That’s fascinating. do you see that as being something that will move to practical application?

      Desirée: One of the things that we’re doing to try to translate this to meaningful applications for the world is to scale the technology. We’re fortunate to have funding from several different sources, some private philanthropy groups and the United States Department of Energy. They’re helping us over the next three years try to scale this in places where it might matter most. Perhaps counterintuitive places, coal mines. Coal mines emit a lot of methane and it happens to be enriched in such a way that it releases energy. It might release enough energy to actually pay for the technology itself. Another place we’re really focused on is dairy.

      Sally: Really interesting. You mentioned at the beginning that you were at MIT, you left, you came back. I’m just wondering — I’m new to MIT and, obviously, I’m just learning it — but how do you think about the MIT community or culture in a way that is particularly helpful in advancing your work?

      Desirée: For me, I was really excited to come back to MIT because it is such an innovative place. If you’re someone who says, “I want to change the way we invent materials and processes,” it’s one of the best places you could possibly be. Because you can walk down the hall and bump into people who are making new things, new molecules, new materials, and say, “How can we incorporate the environment into our decision-making process?”

      As engineering professors, we’re guilty of teaching our students to optimize for performance and cost. They go out into their jobs, and guess what? That’s what they optimize for. We want to transition, and we’re at a point in our understanding of the earth system, that we could actually start to incorporate environmental objectives into that design process.

      Engineering professors of tomorrow should, say, optimize for performance and cost and the environment. That’s really what made me very excited to come back to MIT. Not just the great research that’s going on in every nook and corner of the Institute, but also thinking about how we might influence engineering education so that this becomes part of the fabric of how humans invent new practices and processes.

      Sally: If you look back in your past, you talked about your childhood in Maine and observing these patterns. You talked about your training and how you came to MIT and have really been, I think, thriving here. Was there a path not taken, a road not taken if you hadn’t become an environmental chemist? Was there something else you really wanted to do?

      Desirée: That’s such a great question. I have a lot of loves. I love the ocean. I love writing. I love teaching and I’m doing that, so I’m lucky there. I also love the beer business. My family’s in the beer business in Maine. I thought, as a biochemist, I would always be able to fall back on that if I needed to. My family’s not in the beer business because we’re particularly good at making beer, but because they’re interested in making businesses and creating opportunities for people. That’s been an important part of our role in the state of Maine.

      MIT really supports that side of my mind, as well. I love the entrepreneurial ecosystem that exists here. I love that when you bump into people and you have a crazy idea, instead of giving you all the reasons it won’t work, an MIT person gives you all the reasons it won’t work and then they say, “This is how we’re going to make it happen.” That’s really fun and exciting. The entrepreneurship environment that exists here is really very supportive of the translation process that has to happen to get something from the lab to the global impact that we’re looking for. That supports my mission just so much. It’s been a joy.

      Sally: That’s excellent. You weren’t actually tempted to become a yeast cell biologist in the service of beer production?

      Desirée: No, no, but I joke, “They only call me when something goes really bad.”

      Sally: That’s really funny. You experienced MIT as a student, now you’re experiencing it as a faculty member. What do you wish there was one thing about each group that the other knew?

      Desirée: I wish that, speaking with my faculty hat on, that the students knew just how much we care about them. I know that some of them do and really appreciate that. When I send an email at 3:00 in the morning, I get emails back from my colleagues at 3:00 in the morning. We work around the clock and we don’t do that for ourselves. We do that to make great sustainable systems for them and to create opportunity for them to propel themselves forward. To me, that’s one of the common unifying features of an MIT faculty member. We care really deeply about the student experience.

      As a student, I think that we’re hungry to learn. We wanted to really see the ins and outs of operation, how to run a research lab. I think sometimes faculty try to spare their students from that and maybe it’s okay to let them know just what’s going on in all those meetings that we sit through.

      Sally: That’s interesting. I think there are definitely things you find out when you become a faculty member and you’re like, “Oh, so this is what they were thinking.” With regard to the passion of the faculty about teaching, it really is remarkable here. I really think some of the strongest researchers here are so invested in teaching and you see that throughout the community.

      Desirée: It’s a labor of love for sure.

      Sally: Exactly. You talked a little bit about the passion for teaching. Were there teachers along your way that you really think impacted you and changed the direction of what you’re doing?

      Desirée: Yes, absolutely. I could name all of them. I had a kindergarten teacher who would stay after school and wait for my mom to be done work. I was raised by a single mom and her siblings and that was amazing. I had a fourth-grade teacher who helped promote me through school and taught me to love the environment. If you ask fourth graders if they saw any trash on the way to school, they’ll all say, “No.” You take them outside and give them a trash bag to fill up and it’ll be full by the end of the hour. This is something I’ve done with students in Cambridge to this day and this was many years on now. She really got me aware and thinking about environmental problems and how we might change systems.

      Sally: I think it’s really great for faculty to think about their own experiences, but also to hear people who become faculty members reflect on the great impact their own teachers had. I think the things folks are doing here are going to reverberate in their student’s minds for many, many years. It also is interesting in terms of thinking about the pipeline and when you get students interested in science. You talk about your own early years of education that really ultimately had an impact.

      It’s funny, when I became president at MIT, I got a note from my second-grade teacher. I remembered her like it was yesterday. These are people that really had an impact. It’s great that we honor teaching here at MIT and we acknowledge that this is going to have a really big impact on our student’s lives.

      Desirée: Yes, absolutely. It’s a privilege to teach these top talents. At many schools around the country, it’s just young people that have so much potential. I feel like when we walk into that classroom, we’ve got to bring inspiration with us along with the tangible, practical skills. It’s been great to see what they become.

      Sally: Tell me a little bit about what you do outside of work. When you ask faculty hobbies, sometimes I go, “Hobbies?” There must be something you spend your time on. I’m just curious.

      Desirée: We’re worried we’re going to fail this part of the Q&A. Yes. I have four children.

      Sally: You don’t need any hobbies then.

      Desirée: I know. It’s been the good graces of the academic institution. Just for those people who are out there thinking about going into academia and say, “It’s too hard. I couldn’t possibly have the work and life that I seek if I go into academia,” I don’t think that’s true anymore. I know there are a lot of women who paved the way for me, and men for that matter. I remember my PhD advisors being fully present for their children. I’ve been very fortunate to be able to do the same thing. I spend lots of time taking care of them right now. But we love being out in nature hiking, skiing, and kayaking and enjoying what the Earth gives us.

      Sally: It’s also fun to see that “aha” moment in your children when they start to learn a little bit about science and they get the idea that you really can discover things by observing closely. I don’t know if they realize they benefit from having parents who think that way, but I think that also stays with them through their lives.

      Desirée: My son is just waiting for the phone call to be able to be part of MIT’s toy design class.

      Sally: That’s fantastic.

      Desirée: As an official evaluator. Yes.

      Sally: In the last five years or so, we’ve been through the pandemic. In practical terms, how you think about your work and your life, what do you do that has improved your life? I always hate the words of “work-life balance” because they’re so intermeshed, but just for the broader community, how have you thought about that?

      Desirée: I’ve been thinking about my Zoom world and how I am still able to do quite a bit of talking to my colleagues and advancing the research mission and talking to my students that I wouldn’t have been able to do. Even pre-pandemic, it would’ve been pretty hard. We’re all really trained to interact more efficiently through these media and mechanisms. I know how to give a good talk on Zoom, for better or worse. I think that that’s been something that has been great.

      In the context of environment, I think a lot of us—this might be cliched at this point—but realize that there are things that we don’t need to get up on a plane for and perhaps we can work on the computer and interact in that way. I think that’s awesome. There’s not much that can replace real, in-person human interaction, but if it means that you can juggle a few more balls in the air and have your family feel valued and yourself feel valued while you’re also valuing your work that thing that is igniting for you, I think that’s a great outcome.

      Sally: I think that’s right. Unfortunately, though, your kids may never know the meaning of a snow day.

      Desirée: You got it.

      Sally: They may be on a remote school whenever we would’ve been home building snow forts.

      Desirée: As a Mainer, I appreciate this fully, and almost had to write a note this year. Just let them go outside.

      Sally: Exactly, exactly. As we’re wrapping up, just thinking about the future of climate work and coming back to the science, I think you’ve thought a lot about what you’re doing and impact on the climate. I’m just wondering, as you look around MIT, where you think we might have some of the greatest impact? How do you think about what some of your colleagues are doing? Because I’m starting to think a lot about what MIT’s real footprint in this area is going to be.

      Desirée: The first thing I want to say is that I think for a long time, the world’s been looking for a silver bullet climate solution. That is not how we got into this problem and it’s not how we’re going to get out of it.

      Sally: Exactly.

      Desirée: We need a thousand BBs. Fortunately, at MIT, there are many thousands of minds that all have something to contribute. I like to impose, especially on the undergraduates and the graduate researchers, our student population out there, think, “How can I bring my talents to bear on this really most pressing and important problem that’s facing our world right now?” I would say just whatever your skill is and whatever your passion is, try to find a way to marry those things together and find a way to have impact.

      The other thing I would say is that we think really differently about problems. That’s what might be needed. If you’re going to break systems, you need to come at it from a different perspective or a different angle. Encouraging people to think differently, as this community does so well, I think is going to be an enormous asset in bringing some solutions to the climate change challenge.

      Sally: Excellent. If you look back over your career, and even earlier than when you became a faculty member, what do you think the best advice is that you’ve ever been given?

      Desirée: There’s so much. I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of really great mentors. What is the best piece of advice? I think this notion of balancing work and not work. I’ve gotten two really key points of advice. One is about travel. I think that ties into this concept of COVID and whether now we can actually go remote for a lot of things. It was from an MIT professor. He said, “You know, the biggest thing you can do to protect your personal life and your life with your family is to say no and travel less. Travel eats up time on the front, in the back, and it’s your family that’s paying the price for that, so be really judicious about your choices.” That was excellent advice for me.

      Another female faculty member of mine said, “You have to prioritize your family like they are an appointment on your calendar and it’s okay when you do that.” I think those have been really helpful for me as I navigate and struggle with my own very mission-oriented self where I want to keep working and put my focus there, but know that it’s okay to maybe go for a walk and talk to real people.

      Sally: Go wild.

      Desirée: Yes, that’s right.

      Sally: This issue, actually, of saying no, not only to travel but thinking about where you really place your efforts and when there’s a finite amount of time. When I think about this—and advising junior faculty in terms of service—every faculty member is going to be asked way more things than they’re going to want to do. Yet, their service to the department, service to the Institute, is important, not only for their advancement but in how we create a community. I always advise people to say yes to the things they’re truly interested in and they’re passionate about, and there will be enough of those things.

      Desirée: I have a flowchart for when to say yes and when to say no. Having an interest is at the top of the list and then feeling like you’re going to have an impact. That’s something I think, when we do this service at MIT, we really are able to have an impact. It’s not just the oldest people in the room that get to drive the bus. They’re really listening and want to hear that perspective from everybody.

      Sally: That’s excellent. Thanks again, Desirée. I really enjoyed that conversation. To our audience, thanks again for listening to Curiosity Unbounded. I very much hope you’ll all join us again. I’m Sally Kornbluth. Stay curious. More

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      in Environment

      MIT PhD students honored for their work to solve critical issues in water and food

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      In 2017, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) initiated the J-WAFS Fellowship Program for outstanding MIT PhD students working to solve humankind’s water-related challenges. Since then, J-WAFS has awarded 18 fellowships to students who have gone on to create innovations like a pump that can maximize energy efficiency even with changing flow rates, and a low-cost water filter made out of sapwood xylem that has seen real-world use in rural India. Last year, J-WAFS expanded eligibility to students with food-related research. The 2022 fellows included students working on micronutrient deficiency and plastic waste from traditional food packaging materials. 

      Today, J-WAFS has announced the award of the 2023-24 fellowships to Gokul Sampath and Jie Yun. A doctoral student in the Department of Urban Studies and planning, Sampath has been awarded the Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellowship for Water Solutions, which is supported through a generous gift from Elina and Nikhil Meswani and family. Yun, who is in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, received a J-WAFS Fellowship for Water and Food Solutions, which is funded by the J-WAFS Research Affiliate Program. Currently, Xylem, Inc. and GoAigua are J-WAFS’ Research Affiliate companies. A review committee comprised of MIT faculty and staff selected Sampath and Yun from a competitive field of outstanding graduate students working in water and food who were nominated by their faculty advisors. Sampath and Yun will receive one academic semester of funding, along with opportunities for networking and mentoring to advance their research.

      “Both Yun and Sampath have demonstrated excellence in their research,” says J-WAFS executive director Renee J. Robins. “They also stood out in their communication skills and their passion to work on issues of agricultural sustainability and resilience and access to safe water. We are so pleased to have them join our inspiring group of J-WAFS fellows,” she adds.

      Using behavioral health strategies to address the arsenic crisis in India and Bangladesh

      Gokul Sampath’s research centers on ways to improve access to safe drinking water in developing countries. A PhD candidate in the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, his current work examines the issue of arsenic in drinking water sources in India and Bangladesh. In Eastern India, millions of shallow tube wells provide rural households a personal water source that is convenient, free, and mostly safe from cholera. Unfortunately, it is now known that one-in-four of these wells is contaminated with naturally occurring arsenic at levels dangerous to human health. As a result, approximately 40 million people across the region are at elevated risk of cancer, stroke, and heart disease from arsenic consumed through drinking water and cooked food. 

      Since the discovery of arsenic in wells in the late 1980s, governments and nongovernmental organizations have sought to address the problem in rural villages by providing safe community water sources. Yet despite access to safe alternatives, many households still consume water from their contaminated home wells. Sampath’s research seeks to understand the constraints and trade-offs that account for why many villagers don’t collect water from arsenic-safe government wells in the village, even when they know their own wells at home could be contaminated.

      Before coming to MIT, Sampath received a master’s degree in Middle East, South Asian, and African studies from Columbia University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in microbiology and history from the University of California at Davis. He has long worked on water management in India, beginning in 2015 as a Fulbright scholar studying households’ water source choices in arsenic-affected areas of the state of West Bengal. He also served as a senior research associate with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, where he conducted randomized evaluations of market incentives for groundwater conservation in Gujarat, India. Sampath’s advisor, Bishwapriya Sanyal, the Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning at MIT, says Sampath has shown “remarkable hard work and dedication.” In addition to his classes and research, Sampath taught the department’s undergraduate Introduction to International Development course, for which he received standout evaluations from students.

      This summer, Sampath will travel to India to conduct field work in four arsenic-affected villages in West Bengal to understand how social influence shapes villagers’ choices between arsenic-safe and unsafe water sources. Through longitudinal surveys, he hopes to connect data on the social ties between families in villages and the daily water source choices they make. Exclusionary practices in Indian village communities, especially the segregation of water sources on the basis of caste and religion, has long been suspected to be a barrier to equitable drinking water access in Indian villages. Yet despite this, planners seeking to expand safe water access in diverse Indian villages have rarely considered the way social divisions within communities might be working against their efforts. Sampath hopes to test whether the injunctive norms enabled by caste ties constrain villagers’ ability to choose the safest water source among those shared within the village. When he returns to MIT in the fall, he plans to dive into analyzing his survey data and start work on a publication.

      Understanding plant responses to stress to improve crop drought resistance and yield

      Plants, including crops, play a fundamental role in Earth’s ecosystems through their effects on climate, air quality, and water availability. At the same time, plants grown for agriculture put a burden on the environment as they require energy, irrigation, and chemical inputs. Understanding plant/environment interactions is becoming more and more important as intensifying drought is straining agricultural systems. Jie Yun, a PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is studying plant response to drought stress in the hopes of improving agricultural sustainability and yield under climate change.  Yun’s research focuses on genotype-by-environment interaction (GxE.) This relates to the observation that plant varieties respond to environmental changes differently. The effects of GxE in crop breeding can be exploited because differing environmental responses among varieties enables breeders to select for plants that demonstrate high stress-tolerant genotypes under particular growing conditions. Yun bases her studies on Brachypodium, a model grass species related to wheat, oat, barley, rye, and perennial forage grasses. By experimenting with this species, findings can be directly applied to cereal and forage crop improvement. For the first part of her thesis, Yun collaborated with Professor Caroline Uhler’s group in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. Uhler’s computational tools helped Yun to evaluate gene regulatory networks and how they relate to plant resilience and environmental adaptation. This work will help identify the types of genes and pathways that drive differences in drought stress response among plant varieties.  David Des Marais, the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is Yun’s advisor. He notes, “throughout Jie’s time [at MIT] I have been struck by her intellectual curiosity, verging on fearlessness.” When she’s not mentoring undergraduate students in Des Marais’ lab, Yun is working on the second part of her project: how carbon allocation in plants and growth is affected by soil drying. One result of this work will be to understand which populations of plants harbor the necessary genetic diversity to adapt or acclimate to climate change. Another likely impact is identifying targets for the genetic improvement of crop species to increase crop yields with less water supply. Growing up in China, Yun witnessed environmental issues springing from the development of the steel industry, which caused contamination of rivers in her hometown. On one visit to her aunt’s house in rural China, she learned that water pollution was widespread after noticing wastewater was piped outside of the house into nearby farmland without being treated. These experiences led Yun to study water supply and sewage engineering for her undergraduate degree at Shenyang Jianzhu University. She then went on to complete a master’s program in civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. It was there that Yun discovered a passion for plant-environment interactions; during an independent study on perfluorooctanoic sulfonate, she realized the amazing ability of plants to adapt to environmental changes, toxins, and stresses. Her goal is to continue researching plant and environment interactions and to translate the latest scientific findings into applications that can improve food security. More

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      in Environment

      A new microneedle-based drug delivery technique for plants

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      Increasing environmental conditions caused by climate change, an ever-growing human population, scarcity of arable land, and limited resources are pressuring the agriculture industry to adopt more sustainable and precise practices that foster more efficient use of resources (e.g., water, fertilizers, and pesticides) and mitigation of environmental impacts. Developing delivery systems that efficiently deploy agrochemicals such as micronutrients, pesticides, and antibiotics in crops will help ensure high productivity and high produce quality, while minimizing the waste of resources, is crucial.

      Now, researchers in Singapore and the U.S. have developed the first-ever microneedle-based drug delivery technique for plants. The method can be used to precisely deliver controlled amounts of agrochemicals to specific plant tissues for research purposes. When applied in the field, it could one day be used in precision agriculture to improve crop quality and disease management.

      The work is led by researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and their collaborators from MIT and the Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL).

      Current and standard practices for agrochemical application in plants, such as foliar spray, are inefficient due to off-target application, quick runoff in the rain, and actives’ rapid degradation. These practices also cause significant detrimental environmental side effects, such as water and soil contamination, biodiversity loss, and degraded ecosystems; and public health concerns, such as respiratory problems, chemical exposure, and food contamination.

      The novel silk-based microneedles technique circumvents these limitations by deploying and targeting a known amount of payload directly into a plant’s deep tissues, which will lead to higher efficacy of plant growth and help with disease management. The technique is minimally invasive, as it delivers the compound without causing long-term damage to the plants, and is environmentally sustainable. It minimizes resource wastage and mitigates the adverse side effects caused by agrochemical contamination of the environment. Additionally, it will help foster precise agricultural practices and provide new tools to study plants and design crop traits, helping to ensure food security.

      Described in a paper titled “Drug Delivery in Plants Using Silk Microneedles,” published in a recent issue of Advanced Materials, the research studies the first-ever polymeric microneedles used to deliver small compounds to a wide variety of plants and the plant response to biomaterial injection. Through gene expression analysis, the researchers could closely examine the reactions to drug delivery following microneedle injection. Minimal scar and callus formation were observed, suggesting minimal injection-induced wounding to the plant. The proof of concept provided in this study opens the door to plant microneedles’ application in plant biology and agriculture, enabling new means to regulate plant physiology and study metabolisms via efficient and effective delivery of payloads.

      The study optimized the design of microneedles to target the systemic transport system in Arabidopsis (mouse-ear cress), the chosen model plant. Gibberellic acid (GA3), a widely used plant growth regulator in agriculture, was selected for the delivery. The researchers found that delivering GA3 through microneedles was more effective in promoting growth than traditional methods (such as foliar spray). They then confirmed the effectiveness using genetic methods and demonstrated that the technique is applicable to various plant species, including vegetables, cereals, soybeans, and rice.

      Professor Benedetto Marelli, co-corresponding author of the paper, principal investigator at DiSTAP, and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, shares, “The technique saves resources as compared to current methods of agrochemical delivery, which suffer from wastage. During the application, the microneedles break through the tissue barriers and release compounds directly inside the plants, avoiding agrochemical losses. The technique also allows for precise control of the amounts of the agrochemical used, ensuring high-tech precision agriculture and crop growth to optimize yield.”

      “The first-of-its-kind technique is revolutionary for the agriculture industry. It also minimizes resource wastage and environmental contamination. In the future, with automated microneedle application as a possibility, the technique may be used in high-tech outdoor and indoor farms for precise agrochemical delivery and disease management,” adds Yunteng Cao, the first author of the paper and postdoc at MIT.

      “This work also highlights the importance of using genetic tools to study plant responses to biomaterials. Analyzing these responses at the genetic level offers a comprehensive understanding of these responses, thereby serving as a guide for the development of future biomaterials that can be used across the agri-food industry,” says Sally Koh, the co-first author of this work and PhD candidate from NUS and TLL.

      The future seems promising as Professor Daisuke Urano, co-corresponding author of the paper, TLL principal investigator, and NUS adjunct assistant professor elaborates, “Our research has validated the use of silk-based microneedles for agrochemical application, and we look forward to further developing the technique and microneedle design into a scalable model for manufacturing and commercialization. At the same time, we are also actively investigating potential applications that could have a significant impact on society.”

      The study of drug delivery in plants using silk microneedles expanded upon previous research supervised by Marelli. The original idea was conceived by SMART and MIT: Marelli, Cao, and Professor Nam-Hai Chua, co-lead principal investigator at DiSTAP. Researchers from TLL and the National University of Singapore, Professor Urano Daisuke and Koh, joined the study to contribute biological perspectives. The research is carried out by SMART and supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore (NRF) under its Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise (CREATE) program.

      SMART was established by MIT and NRF in 2007. SMART is the first entity in CREATE, developed by NRF. SMART serves as an intellectual and innovation hub for research interactions between MIT and Singapore, undertaking cutting-edge research in areas of interest to both parties. SMART currently comprises an Innovation Center and interdisciplinary research groups: Antimicrobial Resistance, Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine, DiSTAP, Future Urban Mobility, and Low Energy Electronic Systems. More

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      in Environment

      Victor K. McElheny Award in science journalism honors series on poultry farming and the environment

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      The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT has announced that the investigative series “Big Poultry,” published by The Charlotte Observer and The Raleigh News & Observer, has been chosen as the 2023 winner of the Victor K. McElheny Award for local and regional journalism. This series of articles uncovered the wide-ranging, unregulated impact of the poultry industry in North Carolina — from odors to pollution to the predatory nature of poultry contract farming.

      The series draws from more than 130 interviews and involved extensive analysis of satellite imagery, industry finances, and state laws, among other data. It expertly merges personal stories and hard data and creates a cohesive and comprehensive deep dive into an underreported, but pervasive, phenomenon in North Carolina. The series has engaged tens of thousands of readers and sparked a debate about the poultry industry in the state legislature.

      “With remarkable enterprise and persistence, these reporters from the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer penetrated the secrecy that obscures the scope and impact of thousands of industrial-scale poultry production farms in North Carolina, which together generate billions of pounds of unchecked agricultural waste,” a judge said of the series.

      “Big Poultry” was reported and written by Charlotte Observer investigative reporters Gavin Off and Ames Alexander and News & Observer environmental reporter Adam Wagner. The series was edited by McClatchy Southeast Investigations Editor Cathy Clabby and was supported by the work of News & Observer investigative reporters David Raynor and Tyler Dukes, and McClatchy newspapers visual journalists.

      “The Victor K. McElheny award recognizes the remarkable science reporting done at the local level by American journalists, and ‘Big Poultry’ is an outstanding example of that,” says Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. “We are proud to honor this series, which raises such important issues and reminds us of the essential role of journalists in protecting our country by illuminating such problems.”

      The 2023 McElheny Award received a robust and diverse pool of submissions from around the United States. Also on the short list of finalists for the award are four other exceptional journalism projects: “Undermined,” a collaboration between Navajo Times, Santa Fe Reporter, Source New Mexico, Capital & Main, and USA Today that uncovered the link between uranium poisoning and increased vulnerability to the Covid-19 virus in the Navajo Nation; “Fighting for Air,” from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which examines the intersection of asthma with substandard housing and health systems; “When the Heat is Unbearable but There’s Nowhere to Go,” a collaboration between High Country News and Type Investigations, which exposed the impact of extreme heat on the incarcerated population of Washington State; and “There Must be Something in the Water,” published by the Minnesota Reformer, which investigated how the company 3M obscured the impact of chemical contamination in the water of Washington Country, Minnesota, and the ongoing health impacts of said contamination on the population.

      Named after the Knight Science Journalism Program’s founding director, the Victor K. McElheny Award was established to honor outstanding coverage of science, public-health, technology, and environmental issues at the local and regional level. The winning team will receive a $10,000 prize. The winners will be honored at the Knight Science Journalism Program’s 40th anniversary celebration on Saturday, April 22.

      The Knight Science Journalism Program extends a special thanks to the 2022 McElheny Award jurors: Jeff DelViscio (senior multimedia editor, Scientific American); Robert Lee Hotz (president, Alicia Patterson Foundation); Brant Houston, (Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting, University of Illinois); Amina Khan (science editor, National Public Radio); and Maya Kapoor (assistant professor of English, North Carolina State University). The program also extends warm appreciation to the award’s screeners: Mary-Rose Abraham, Sebastien Malo, Wojtek Brzezinski, and Kelly Servick.

      The McElheny Award is made possible by generous support from Victor K. McElheny, Ruth McElheny, and the Rita Allen Foundation.

      A complete list of 2023 Victor K. McElheny Award honorees:

      Winner

      “Big Poultry,” by Gavin Off , Ames Alexander, and Adam Wagner (The Charlotte Observer and The Raleigh News & Observer)

      Finalists

      “Undermined,” by Eli Cahan (Navajo Times, Santa Fe Reporter, Source New Mexico, Capital & Main, and USA Today)

      “Fighting for Air,” by Talis Shelbourne (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

      “When the Heat is Unbearable but There’s Nowhere to Go,” by Sarah Sax (High Country News and Type Investigations)

      “There Must be Something in the Water,” by Deena Winter (Minnesota Reformer) More

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      in Security

      Tackling counterfeit seeds with “unclonable” labels

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      Average crop yields in Africa are consistently far below those expected, and one significant reason is the prevalence of counterfeit seeds whose germination rates are far lower than those of the genuine ones. The World Bank estimates that as much as half of all seeds sold in some African countries are fake, which could help to account for crop production that is far below potential.

      There have been many attempts to prevent this counterfeiting through tracking labels, but none have proved effective; among other issues, such labels have been vulnerable to hacking because of the deterministic nature of their encoding systems. But now, a team of MIT researchers has come up with a kind of tiny, biodegradable tag that can be applied directly to the seeds themselves, and that provides a unique randomly created code that cannot be duplicated.

      The new system, which uses minuscule dots of silk-based material, each containing a unique combination of different chemical signatures, is described today in the journal Science Advances in a paper by MIT’s dean of engineering Anantha Chandrakasan, professor of civil and environmental engineering Benedetto Marelli, postdoc Hui Sun, and graduate student Saurav Maji.

      The problem of counterfeiting is an enormous one globally, the researchers point out, affecting everything from drugs to luxury goods, and many different systems have been developed to try to combat this. But there has been less attention to the problem in the area of agriculture, even though the consequences can be severe. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the World Bank estimates that counterfeit seeds are a significant factor in crop yields that average less than one-fifth of the potential for maize, and less than one-third for rice.

      Marelli explains that a key to the new system is creating a randomly-produced physical object whose exact composition is virtually impossible to duplicate. The labels they create “leverage randomness and uncertainty in the process of application, to generate unique signature features that can be read, and that cannot be replicated,” he says.

      What they’re dealing with, Sun adds, “is the very old job of trying, basically, not to get your stuff stolen. And you can try as much as you can, but eventually somebody is always smart enough to figure out how to do it, so nothing is really unbreakable. But the idea is, it’s almost impossible, if not impossible, to replicate it, or it takes so much effort that it’s not worth it anymore.”

      The idea of an “unclonable” code was originally developed as a way of protecting the authenticity of computer chips, explains Chandrakasan, who is the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “In integrated circuits, individual transistors have slightly different properties coined device variations,” he explains, “and you could then use that variability and combine that variability with higher-level circuits to create a unique ID for the device. And once you have that, then you can use that unique ID as a part of a security protocol. Something like transistor variability is hard to replicate from device to device, so that’s what gives it its uniqueness, versus storing a particular fixed ID.” The concept is based on what are known as physically unclonable functions, or PUFs.

      The team decided to try to apply that PUF principle to the problem of fake seeds, and the use of silk proteins was a natural choice because the material is not only harmless to the environment but also classified by the Food and Drug Administration in the “generally recognized as safe” category, so it requires no special approval for use on food products.

      “You could coat it on top of seeds,” Maji says, “and if you synthesize silk in a certain way, it will also have natural random variations. So that’s the idea, that every seed or every bag could have a unique signature.”

      Developing effective secure system solutions has long been one of Chandrakasan’s specialties, while Marelli has spent many years developing systems for applying silk coatings to a variety of fruits, vegetables, and seeds, so their collaboration was a natural for developing such a silk-based coding system toward enhanced security.

      “The challenge was what type of form factor to give to silk,” Sun says, “so that it can be fabricated very easily.” They developed a simple drop-casting approach that produces tags that are less than one-tenth of an inch in diameter. The second challenge was to develop “a way where we can read the uniqueness, in also a very high throughput and easy way.”

      For the unique silk-based codes, Marelli says, “eventually we found a way to add a color to these microparticles so that they assemble in random structures.” The resulting unique patterns can be read out not only by a spectrograph or a portable microscope, but even by an ordinary cellphone camera with a macro lens. This image can be processed locally to generate the PUF code and then sent to the cloud and compared with a secure database to ensure the authenticity of the product. “It’s random so that people cannot easily replicate it,” says Sun. “People cannot predict it without measuring it.”

      And the number of possible permutations that could result from the way they mix four basic types of colored silk nanoparticles is astronomical. “We were able to show that with a minimal amount of silk, we were able to generate 128 random bits of security,” Maji says. “So this gives rise to 2 to the power 128 possible combinations, which is extremely difficult to crack given the computational capabilities of the state-of-the-art computing systems.”

      Marelli says that “for us, it’s a good test bed in order to think out-of-the-box, and how we can have a path that somehow is more democratic.” In this case, that means “something that you can literally read with your phone, and you can fabricate by simply drop casting a solution, without using any advanced manufacturing technique, without going in a clean room.”

      Some additional work will be needed to make this a practical commercial product, Chandrakasan says. “There will have to be a development for at-scale reading” via smartphones. “So, that’s clearly a future opportunity.” But the principle now shows a clear path to the day when “a farmer could at least, maybe not every seed, but could maybe take some random seeds in a particular batch and verify them,” he says.

      The research was partially supported by the U.S. Office of Naval research and the National Science Foundation, Analog Devices Inc., an EECS Mathworks fellowship, and a Paul M. Cook Career Development Professorship. More

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      in Environment

      Detailed images from space offer clearer picture of drought effects on plants

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      “MIT is a place where dreams come true,” says César Terrer, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Here at MIT, Terrer says he’s given the resources needed to explore ideas he finds most exciting, and at the top of his list is climate science. In particular, he is interested in plant-soil interactions, and how the two can mitigate impacts of climate change. In 2022, Terrer received seed grant funding from the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) to produce drought monitoring systems for farmers. The project is leveraging a new generation of remote sensing devices to provide high-resolution plant water stress at regional to global scales.

      Growing up in Granada, Spain, Terrer always had an aptitude and passion for science. He studied environmental science at the University of Murcia, where he interned in the Department of Ecology. Using computational analysis tools, he worked on modeling species distribution in response to human development. Early on in his undergraduate experience, Terrer says he regarded his professors as “superheroes” with a kind of scholarly prowess. He knew he wanted to follow in their footsteps by one day working as a faculty member in academia. Of course, there would be many steps along the way before achieving that dream. 

      Upon completing his undergraduate studies, Terrer set his sights on exciting and adventurous research roles. He thought perhaps he would conduct field work in the Amazon, engaging with native communities. But when the opportunity arose to work in Australia on a state-of-the-art climate change experiment that simulates future levels of carbon dioxide, he headed south to study how plants react to CO2 in a biome of native Australian eucalyptus trees. It was during this experience that Terrer started to take a keen interest in the carbon cycle and the capacity of ecosystems to buffer rising levels of CO2 caused by human activity.

      Around 2014, he began to delve deeper into the carbon cycle as he began his doctoral studies at Imperial College London. The primary question Terrer sought to answer during his PhD was “will plants be able to absorb predicted future levels of CO2 in the atmosphere?” To answer the question, Terrer became an early adopter of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and remote sensing to analyze data from real-life, global climate change experiments. His findings from these “ground truth” values and observations resulted in a paper in the journal Science. In it, he claimed that climate models most likely overestimated how much carbon plants will be able to absorb by the end of the century, by a factor of three. 

      After postdoctoral positions at Stanford University and the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, followed by a prestigious Lawrence Fellowship, Terrer says he had “too many ideas and not enough time to accomplish all those ideas.” He knew it was time to lead his own group. Not long after applying for faculty positions, he landed at MIT. 

      New ways to monitor drought

      Terrer is employing similar methods to those he used during his PhD to analyze data from all over the world for his J-WAFS project. He and postdoc Wenzhe Jiao collect data from remote sensing satellites and field experiments and use machine learning to come up with new ways to monitor drought. Terrer says Jiao is a “remote sensing wizard,” who fuses data from different satellite products to understand the water cycle. With Jiao’s hydrology expertise and Terrer’s knowledge of plants, soil, and the carbon cycle, the duo is a formidable team to tackle this project.

      According to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, the number and duration of droughts has increased by 29 percent since 2000, as compared to the two previous decades. From the Horn of Africa to the Western United States, drought is devastating vegetation and severely stressing water supplies, compromising food production and spiking food insecurity. Drought monitoring can offer fundamental information on drought location, frequency, and severity, but assessing the impact of drought on vegetation is extremely challenging. This is because plants’ sensitivity to water deficits varies across species and ecosystems. 

      Terrer and Jiao are able to obtain a clearer picture of how drought is affecting plants by employing the latest generation of remote sensing observations, which offer images of the planet with incredible spatial and temporal resolution. Satellite products such as Sentinel, Landsat, and Planet can provide daily images from space with such high resolution that individual trees can be discerned. Along with the images and datasets from satellites, the team is using ground-based observations from meteorological data. They are also using the MIT SuperCloud at MIT Lincoln Laboratory to process and analyze all of the data sets. The J-WAFS project is among one of the first to leverage high-resolution data to quantitatively measure plant drought impacts in the United States with the hopes of expanding to a global assessment in the future.

      Assisting farmers and resource managers 

      Every week, the U.S. Drought Monitor provides a map of drought conditions in the United States. The map has zero resolution and is more of a drought recap or summary, unable to predict future drought scenarios. The lack of a comprehensive spatiotemporal evaluation of historic and future drought impacts on global vegetation productivity is detrimental to farmers both in the United States and worldwide.  

      Terrer and Jiao plan to generate metrics for plant water stress at an unprecedented resolution of 10-30 meters. This means that they will be able to provide drought monitoring maps at the scale of a typical U.S. farm, giving farmers more precise, useful data every one to two days. The team will use the information from the satellites to monitor plant growth and soil moisture, as well as the time lag of plant growth response to soil moisture. In this way, Terrer and Jiao say they will eventually be able to create a kind of “plant water stress forecast” that may be able to predict adverse impacts of drought four weeks in advance. “According to the current soil moisture and lagged response time, we hope to predict plant water stress in the future,” says Jiao. 

      The expected outcomes of this project will give farmers, land and water resource managers, and decision-makers more accurate data at the farm-specific level, allowing for better drought preparation, mitigation, and adaptation. “We expect to make our data open-access online, after we finish the project, so that farmers and other stakeholders can use the maps as tools,” says Jiao. 

      Terrer adds that the project “has the potential to help us better understand the future states of climate systems, and also identify the regional hot spots more likely to experience water crises at the national, state, local, and tribal government scales.” He also expects the project will enhance our understanding of global carbon-water-energy cycle responses to drought, with applications in determining climate change impacts on natural ecosystems as a whole. More

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      in Security

      Titanic robots make farming more sustainable

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      There’s a lot riding on farmers’ ability to fight weeds, which can strangle crops and destroy yields. To protect crops, farmers have two options: They can spray herbicides that pollute the environment and harm human health, or they can hire more workers.

      Unfortunately, both choices are becoming less tenable. Herbicide resistance is a growing problem in crops around the world, while widespread labor shortages have hit the agricultural sector particularly hard.

      Now the startup FarmWise, co-founded by Sebastien Boyer SM ’16, is giving farmers a third option. The company has developed autonomous weeding robots that use artificial intelligence to cut out weeds while leaving crops untouched.

      The company’s first robot, fittingly called the Titan — picture a large tractor that makes use of a trailer in lieu of a driver’s seat — uses machine vision to distinguish weeds from crops including leafy greens, cauliflower, artichokes, and tomatoes while snipping weeds with sub-inch precision.

      About 15 Titans have been roaming the fields of 30 large farms in California and Arizona for the last few years, providing weeding as a service while being directed by an iPad. Last month, the company unveiled its newest robot, Vulcan, which is more lightweight and pulled by a tractor.

      “We have growing population, and we can’t expand the land or water we have, so we need to drastically increase the efficiency of the farming industry,” Boyer says. “I think AI and data are going to be major players in that journey.”

      Finding a road to impact

      Boyer came to MIT in 2014 and earned masters’ degrees in technology and policy as well as electrical engineering and computer science over the next two years.

      “What stood out is the passion that my classmates had for what they did — the drive and passion people had to change the world,” Boyer says.

      As part of his graduate work, Boyer researched machine learning and machine vision techniques, and he soon began exploring ways to apply those technologies to environmental problems. He received a small amount of funding from MIT Sandbox to further develop the idea.

      “That helped me make the decision to not take a real job,” Boyer recalls.

      Following graduation, he and FarmWise co-founder Thomas Palomares, a graduate of Stanford University whom Boyer met in his home country of France, began going to farmers’ markets, introducing themselves to small farmers and asking for tours of their farms. About one in three farmers were happy to show them around. From there they’d ask for referrals to larger farmers and service providers in the industry.

      “We realized agriculture is a large contributor of both emissions and, more broadly, to the negative impact of human activities on the environment,” Boyer says. “It also hasn’t been as disrupted by software, cloud computing, AI, and robotics as other industries. That combination really excites us.”

      Through their conversations, the founders learned herbicides are becoming less effective as weeds develop genetic resistance. The only alternative is to hire more workers, which itself was becoming more difficult for farmers.

      “Labor is extremely tight,” says Boyer, adding that bending over and weeding for 10 hours a day is one of the hardest jobs out there. “The labor supply is shrinking if not collapsing in the U.S., and it’s a worldwide trend. That has real environmental implications because of the tradeoff [between labor and herbicides].”

      The problem is especially acute for farmers of specialty crops, including many fruits, vegetables, and nuts, which grow on smaller farms than corn and soybean and each require slightly different growing practices, limiting the effectiveness of many technical and chemical solutions.

      “We don’t harvest corn by hand today, but we still harvest lettuces and nuts and apples by hand,” Boyer says.

      The Titan was built to complement field workers’ efforts to grow and maintain crops. An operator directs it using an iPad, walking alongside the machine and inspecting progress. Both the Titan and Vulcan are powered by an AI that directs hundreds of tiny blades to snip out weeds around each crop. The Vulcan is controlled directly from the tractor cab, where the operator has a touchscreen interface Boyer compares to those found in a Tesla.

      With more than 15,000 commercial hours under its belt, FarmWise hopes the data it collects can be used for more than just weeding in the near future.

      “It’s all about precision,” Boyer says. “We’re going to better understand what the plant needs and make smarter decisions for each one. That will bring us to a point where we can use the same amount of land, much less water, almost no chemicals, much less fertilizer, and still produce more food than we’re producing today. That’s the mission. That’s what excites me.”

      Weeding out farming challenges

      A customer recently told Boyer that without the Titan, he would have to switch all of his organic crops back to conventional because he couldn’t find enough workers.

      “That’s happening with a lot of customers,” Boyer says. “They have no choice but to rely on herbicides. Acres are staying organic because of our product, and conventional farms are reducing their use of herbicides.”

      Now FarmWise is expanding its database to support weeding for six to 12 new crops each year, and Boyer says adding new crops is getting easier and easier for its system.

      As early partners have sought to expand their deployments, Boyer says the only thing limiting the company’s growth is how fast it can build new robots. FarmWise’s new machines will begin being deployed later this year.

      Although the hulking Titan robots are the face of the company today, the founders hope to leverage the data they’ve collected to further improve farming operations.

      “The mission of the company is to turn AI into a tool that is as reliable and dependable as GPS is now in the farming industry,” Boyer says. “Twenty-five years ago, GPS was a very complicated technology. You had to connect to satellites and do some crazy computation to define your position. But a few companies brought GPS to a new level of reliability and simplicity. Today, every farmer in the world uses GPS. We think AI can have an even deeper impact than GPS has had on the farming industry, and we want to be the company that makes it available and easy to use for every farmer in the world.” More

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      in Environment

      Nanotube sensors are capable of detecting and distinguishing gibberellin plant hormones

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      Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and their collaborators from Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory have developed the first-ever nanosensor that can detect and distinguish gibberellins (GAs), a class of hormones in plants that are important for growth. The novel nanosensors are nondestructive, unlike conventional collection methods, and have been successfully tested in living plants. Applied in the field for early-stage plant stress monitoring, the sensors could prove transformative for agriculture and plant biotechnology, giving farmers interested in high-tech precision agriculture and crop management a valuable tool to optimize yield.

      The researchers designed near-infrared fluorescent carbon nanotube sensors that are capable of detecting and distinguishing two plant hormones, GA3 and GA4. Belonging to a class of plant hormones known as gibberellins, GA3 and GA4 are diterpenoid phytohormones produced by plants that play an important role in modulating diverse processes involved in plant growth and development. GAs are thought to have played a role in the driving forces behind the “green revolution” of the 1960s, which was in turn credited with averting famine and saving the lives of many worldwide. The continued study of gibberellins could lead to further breakthroughs in agricultural science and have implications for food security.

      Climate change, global warming, and rising sea levels cause farming soil to get contaminated by saltwater, raising soil salinity. In turn, high soil salinity is known to negatively regulate GA biosynthesis and promote GA metabolism, resulting in the reduction of GA content in plants. The new nanosensors developed by the SMART researchers allow for the study of GA dynamics in living plants under salinity stress at a very early stage, potentially enabling farmers to make early interventions when eventually applied in the field. This forms the basis of early-stage stress detection.

      Currently, methods to detect GA3 and GA4 typically require mass spectroscopy-based analysis, a time-consuming and destructive process. In contrast, the new sensors developed by the researchers are highly selective for the respective GAs and offer real-time, in vivo monitoring of changes in GA levels across a broad range of plant species.

      Described in a paper titled “Near-Infrared Fluorescent Carbon Nanotube Sensors for the Plant Hormone Family Gibberellins” published in the journal Nano Letters, the research represents a breakthrough for early-stage plant stress detection and holds tremendous potential to advance plant biotechnology and agriculture. This paper builds on previous research by the team at SMART DiSTAP on single-walled carbon nanotube-based nanosensors using the corona phase molecular recognition (CoPhMoRe) platform.

      Based on the CoPhMoRe concept introduced by the lab of MIT Professor Professor Michael Strano, the novel sensors are able to detect GA kinetics in the roots of a variety of model and non-model plant species, including Arabidopsis, lettuce, and basil, as well as GA accumulation during lateral root emergence, highlighting the importance of GA in root system architecture. This was made possible by the researchers’ related development of a new coupled Raman/near infrared fluorimeter that enables self-referencing of nanosensor near infrared fluorescence with its Raman G-band, a new hardware innovation that removes the need for a separate reference nanosensor and greatly simplifies the instrumentation requirements by using a single optical channel to measure hormone concentration.

      Using the reversible GA nanosensors, the researchers detected increased endogenous GA levels in mutant plants producing greater amounts of GA20ox1, a key enzyme in GA biosynthesis, as well as decreased GA levels in plants under salinity stress. When exposed to salinity stress, researchers also found that lettuce growth was severely stunted — an indication that only became apparent after 10 days. In contrast, the GA nanosensors reported decreased GA levels after just six hours, demonstrating their efficacy as a much earlier indicator of salinity stress.

      “Our CoPhMoRe technique allows us to create nanoparticles that act like natural antibodies in that they can recognize and lock onto specific molecules. But they tend to be far more stable than alternatives. We have used this method to successfully create nanosensors for plant signals such as hydrogen peroxide and heavy-metal pollutants like arsenic in plants and soil,” says Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT who is co-corresponding author and DiSTAP co-lead principal investigator. “The method works to create sensors for organic molecules like synthetic auxin — an important plant hormone — as we have shown. This latest breakthrough now extends this success to a plant hormone family called gibberellins — an exceedingly difficult one to recognize.”

      Strano adds: “The resulting technology offers a rapid, real-time, and in vivo method to monitor changes in GA levels in virtually any plant, and can replace current sensing methods which are laborious, destructive, species-specific, and much less efficient.”

      Mervin Chun-Yi Ang, associate scientific director at DiSTAP and co-first author of the paper, says, “More than simply a breakthrough in plant stress detection, we have also demonstrated a hardware innovation in the form of a new coupled Raman/NIR fluorimeter that enabled self-referencing of SWNT sensor fluorescence with its Raman G-band, representing a major advance in the translation of our nanosensing tool sets to the field. In the near future, our sensors can be combined with low-cost electronics, portable optodes, or microneedle interfaces for industrial use, transforming how the industry screens for and mitigates plant stress in food crops and potentially improving growth and yield.”

      The new sensors could yet have a variety of industrial applications and use cases. Daisuke Urano, a Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory principal investigator, National University of Singapore (NUS) adjunct assistant professor, and co-corresponding author of the paper, explains, “GAs are known to regulate a wide range of plant development processes, from shoot, root, and flower development, to seed germination and plant stress responses. With the commercialization of GAs, these plant hormones are also sold to growers and farmers as plant growth regulators to promote plant growth and seed germination. Our novel GA nanosensors could be applied in the field for early-stage plant stress monitoring, and also be used by growers and farmers to track the uptake or metabolism of GA in their crops.”

      The design and development of the nanosensors, creation and validation of the coupled Raman/near infrared fluorimeter and related image/data processing algorithms, as well as statistical analysis of readouts from plant sensors for this study were performed by SMART and MIT. The Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory was responsible for the design, execution, and analysis of plant-related studies, including validation of nanosensors in living plants.

      This research was carried out by SMART and supported by the National Research Foundation of Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise (CREATE) program. The DiSTAP program, led by Strano and Singapore co-lead principal investigator Professor Chua Nam Hai, addresses deep problems in food production in Singapore and the world by developing a suite of impactful and novel analytical, genetic, and biomaterial technologies. The goal is to fundamentally change how plant biosynthetic pathways are discovered, monitored, engineered, and ultimately translated to meet the global demand for food and nutrients. Scientists from MIT, Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and NUS are collaboratively developing new tools for the continuous measurement of important plant metabolites and hormones for novel discovery, deeper understanding and control of plant biosynthetic pathways in ways not yet possible, especially in the context of green leafy vegetables; leveraging these new techniques to engineer plants with highly desirable properties for global food security, including high yield density production, and drought and pathogen resistance, and applying these technologies to improve urban farming.

      SMART was established by MIT and the National Research Foundation of Singapore in 2007. SMART serves as an intellectual and innovation hub for research interactions between MIT and Singapore, undertaking cutting-edge research projects in areas of interest to both Singapore and MIT. SMART currently comprises an Innovation Center and five interdisciplinary research groups: Antimicrobial Resistance, Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine, DiSTAP, Future Urban Mobility, and Low Energy Electronic Systems. More