Abstract
Genetic engineering of plants is at the core of sustainability efforts, natural product synthesis, and agricultural crop engineering. The plant cell wall is often a barrier that limits the ease and throughput with which exogenous biomolecules can be delivered to plants. Current delivery techniques suffer from host range limitations, low transformation efficiencies, toxicity, and unavoidable DNA integration into the host genome. Here, we demonstrate efficient diffusion-based biomolecule delivery into several species of mature plants with a suite of pristine and chemically-functionalized high aspect ratio nanomaterials. Efficient DNA delivery and strong transient protein expression is accomplished in mature Eruca sativa (arugula-dicot) and Triticum aestivum (wheat-monocot) leaves and protoplasts. We also demonstrate a second nanoparticle-based strategy in which small interfering RNA (siRNA) is delivered to mature Nicotiana benthamiana leaves, to effectively silence a gene with 95% efficiency. Our work provides a tool for species-independent, targeted, and passive delivery of genetic material, without transgene integration, into plant cells for diverse plant biotechnology applications.