Rational Ligand Design to Improve Agrochemical Delivery Efficiency and Advance Agriculture Sustainability

The use of agrochemicals - fertilizers and pesticides - in crop production is inefficient, resulting in cascading adverse impacts on the environment and public health. Engineered nanomaterials have the potential to offer innovative solutions for effective, precise, and timed delivery of active ingredients to crops, yielding increased production and preventing overapplication. While promising, there remains an opportunity to realize this targeting capability for enhanced sustainability of crop production. Many studies have demonstrated the efficacy of nanomaterials for agrochemical delivery, yet few exploit the tunable surface chemistry to specifically target the delivery to specific regions of the crop. The primary approach to introducing this capability is through modification of the surface chemistry, typically with ligands. This perspective presents a ligand design strategy for targeting delivery and considers three primary ligand components: the nanomaterial binder, ligand body, and terminal functionality. In addition, we discuss the selection of unique compounds in two target regions, the root and the leaf. We identify ligand terminal functionalities that can be used to interact with specific compounds in these regions enabling enhanced interaction with the agrochemical active ingredient. The result is a proposed set of guidelines to design nanoenabled solutions for enhanced delivery efficiency.

Duke Scholars

Author Leanne Gilbertson Civil and Environmental Engineering