Innovative approaches are urgently required to alleviate the growing pressure on agriculture to meet the rising demand forfood. Chemical Engineering, as a discipline, can address a key challenge for plant biology and agricultural engineering by bridging the knowledge gap between our detailed understanding of modelplants grown under laboratory conditions and the agriculturally important crops cultivated in fields or production facilities. ThisPresentation will highlight the recent development of new chemical engineering tools that provide tissue,cell- or organelle-specific information and analysis of living plants in real time, with the potential to extend across multiple species in fieldapplications. As some examples. the presentation will evaluate the utility of engineered plant nanosensors and portable Raman spectroscopy to detect, model and predict biotic andabiotic stresses, monitor plant hormonal signalling as well as characterize soil,the phytobiome and crop health in a non- orminimally invasive manner. Recent work has shown that plant growth and signaling mechanisms are amenable to chemical engineering description, including biochemical reaction and transport, at the level of molecular species and in real time. The connection between new analytical tools, gene-and other cargo delivery using nanocarriers, and biomaterial interfaces, promise significant advances in the optimization of agricultural systems. Chemical Engineering canleverage these tools to bridge the aforementioned fundamental gap with new synthesisand integration of expertise from plant biology and data science. These advances in sensor and other tools combined with their ability to describe their use with engineering analysis promise to facilitate a new generation of data driven, precision agricultural systems.
