Abstract
Sustainable and precise fortification practices are necessary to ensure food security for the increasing human population. Precision agriculture aims to minimize the use of fertilizers and pesticides by developing smart materials for real-life agricultural practices. Here, we show that biomimetic mineralization can be efficiently employed to encapsulate and controllably release plant biostimulants (MiZax-3) to improve the quality and yield of capsicum (Capsicum annum) crops in field experiments. ZIF-8 encapsulation of MiZax-3 (MiZIFs) could significantly enhance its stability up to around 679 times (6p value = 0.0072) at field conditions. Our results demonstrate that the coordinating Zn ions and the MiZax-3 play a vital role in improving Zn content in the produced fruits by 2-fold, which is the first report of this nature on Zn content in fruits. We envision this platform as a starting point to investigate other biocompatible coordination-based platforms for micronutrient delivery in precision agriculture.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 4732-4740 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Nano Letters |
Volume | 23 |
Issue number | 11 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 14 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research was financially supported by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST; CRG-9/2020 to S.A.-B.) and OSR. Provisional patent (KAUST ref: 2023-019). We would like to thank the KAUST experimental field station and greenhouse personnel in the KAUST core laboratories who helped during the capsicum field trial and ICP-MS analysis of the fruit samples. We also would like to express our sincere gratitude to Mr. Saad Hammad for his help in the collection and handling of the plant tissue samples.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 American Chemical Society.
Keywords
- bioactive molecules
- metal-organic frameworks
- precision agriculture
- smart delivery
- stimuli responsive
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Bioengineering
- General Chemistry
- General Materials Science
- Condensed Matter Physics
- Mechanical Engineering