CBE Seminar Series: Winter 2020

Nanomaterial Platforms for Transgene-Free Plant Genetic Engineering

Food security is threatened by increasing consumption and decreasing crop yields amid population growth and climate change. To mitigate these threats, genetic engineering of plants can be employed to create crops that have higher yields and nutritional value, and are resistant to biotic and abiotic stresses such as diseases and drought. In this seminar, I present the development of a nanomaterial platform that can efficiently deliver genes into both model and agriculturally-relevant crop plants, without mechanical aid, in a non-toxic and non-integrating manner; a combination of features that is not attainable with existing plant transformation approaches. I discuss how single-walled carbon nanotubes can be chemically modified to both load and deliver DNA to plant cells for expression of functional proteins in various plant species including tobacco, arugula, wheat, and cotton.

Biography

Gözde S. Demirer is a PhD candidate in the department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her B.S. in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Koc University, Turkey, as the 2015 valedictorian, where she worked on the advancement of cancer therapeutics by targeted nanoparticles for drug delivery. Demirer’s current PhD thesis research in the Landry lab pioneers the development of nanoparticle-based delivery vehicles for plant genetic engineering applications for food security and advances in sustainable agriculture. She has been awarded a 4-year Schlumberger Foundation Faculty for the Future fellowship in 2016, and she is expected to graduate in May 2020. Demirer was recently selected as one of MIT’s ChemE Rising Stars, for the ACS Merck Research Award, and for Women’s Initiative Committee’s Travel Award.