Markita Landry, University of California, Berkeley

Date: 

Thursday, January 28, 2021, 12:00pm

 

Nanomaterials Engineering to Probe and Control Living Systems 

Markita Landry
Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
University of California, Berkeley

Unique physical, chemical, and optical phenomena arise when materials are confined to the nano-scale. We are  accustomed to making observations and predictions for the behavior of living systems on a macroscopic scale  that is intuitive for the time and size scales of our day-to-day lives. However, the building blocks of life: proteins,  nucleic acids, and cells, occupy different spatiotemporal scales. Our lab focuses on understanding and exploiting  tunable optical and mechanical properties of nanomaterials to access information about biological systems  stored at the nano-scale. In the context of leveraging nanomaterial optical properties, we present recent work on  developing and implementing neuromodulator nanosensors to image serotonin [1] or dopamine [2] volume  transmission in the extracellular space of the brain. We validate our dopamine nanosensor in acute striatal slices  with electrical and optogenetic stimulation of dopamine release, and show disrupted dopamine release or  reuptake kinetics when brain tissue is exposed to dopamine agonist or antagonist drugs [2,3]. In the context of  leveraging nanomaterial chemical properties, we also discuss how high aspect ratio nanomaterials can be  synthesized to carry biomolecular cargo to living systems. In particular, genetic engineering of plants is at the  core of environmental sustainability efforts, but the physical barrier presented by the cell wall has limited the  ease and throughput with which exogenous biomolecules can be delivered to plants. We will describe how  nanomaterials engineering principles can be leveraged to genetically manipulate living plants [4,5], without  transgene integration [6], in efforts to reconcile the benefits of crop genetic engineering with the demand for non GMO foods [7]. Our work in the agricultural space provides a promising tool for species-independent, targeted,  and passive delivery of genetic material, without transgene integration, into plant cells for rapid and parallelizable  testing of plant genotype-phenotype relationships. 

 

1. Jeong, S.*, Yang, D., Beyene, A.G., O’Donnell, J.T.D., Gest, A. M., Navarro, N., Sun, X., Landry, M.P.High Throughput  Evolution of Near Infrared Serotonin Nanosensors. Science Advances 5 (12), 1-12 (2019) 

2. Beyene, A.B., McFarlane, I.R., Pinals, R.L, Landry, M.P.Stochastic Simulation of Dopamine Neuromodulation for  Implementation of Fluorescent Neurochemical Probes in the Striatal Extracellular Space. ACS Chemical Neuroscience 8 (10),  2275-2289 (2017). 

3. Beyene, A. G., Delevich, K., O’Donnell, J.T.D., Piekarski, D.J., Lin, W.C., Thomas, A.W., Yang, S.J., Kosillo, P., Yang, D.,  Wilbrecht, L., Landry, M.P.Imaging Striatal Dopamine Release Using a Non-Genetically Encoded Near-Infrared Fluorescent  Catecholamine Nanosensor. Science Advances 5 (7), 1-11 (2019) 

4. Demirer, G.S., Zhang, H., Matos, J., Goh, N., Cunningham, F.J., Sung, Y., Chang, R., Aditham, A.J., , Chio, L., Cho, M.J.,  Staskawicz, B., Landry, M.P.High Aspect Ratio Nanomaterials Enable Delivery of Functional Genetic Material Without DNA  Integration in Mature Plants. Nature Nanotechnology (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41565-019-0382-5NNANO-18081684 

5. Zhang, H.*, Demirer, G.S.*, Zhang, H., Ye, T., Goh, N.S., Aditham, A.J., Cunningham, F.J., Fan, C., Landry, M.P.Low dimensional DNA Nanostructures Coordinate Gene Silencing in Mature Plants. PNAS (2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1818290116 

6. Demirer, G.S., Zhang, H., Goh, N.S., Grandio, E.G., Landry, M.P.Carbon nanotube-mediated DNA delivery without transgene  integration in intact plants. Nature Protocols (2019). DOI: 0.1038/s41596-019-0208-9