Chapters authored
Plant Nanobionics and Its Applications for Developing Plants with Improved Photosynthetic Capacity
In the present scenario, the ever-growing human population, a decreasing availability of land resources and loss of agricultural productivity are the major global concerns, and these possess a challenge for scientific community. To feed the increasing world population, an increase in the crop productivity with available land resources is one of the essential needs. Crop productivity can be increased by engineering the crop plants for tolerance against various environmental stresses and improving the yield attributes, especially photosynthetic efficiency. Nanomaterials have been developed with new functional properties like improved solar energy harvest. With these nanomaterials, nanobionic plants were developed by the facilitated kinetic trapping of nanomaterials within photosynthetic organelle, that is, chloroplast. The trapping of nanomaterials/nanotubes improved chloroplast carbon capture, that is, photosynthesis by improving chloroplast solar energy harnessing and electron transport rate. Besides improving photosynthesis, nanotubes like poly(acrylic acid) nanoceria (PAA-NC) and single-walled nanotube-nanoceria (SWNT-NC) decrease the amount of reactive oxygen species (ROS) inside extracted chloroplast and influence the sensing process in plants, and these are beneficial for a number of physiological processes. The nanobionic approach to engineer plant functions would lead to an era of plant research at the interface of nanotechnology and plant biology. In this chapter, nanobionic approach, transfer of nanomaterial to plants and their offspring and its potential applications to improve photosynthesis will be discussed.
Part of the book: Photosynthesis