Silk-Based Technology to Boost Food Security

The infrastructure of agro-food systems is responsible for more than 25% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions while facing pressure to support an increasing world population. For the first time in history, the availability of arable land has plateaued, and crop yields are threatened by stressors such as soil salinity and drought that are further exacerbated by climate change. Food security and food waste are twin crises; more than 800 million people are undernourished, and 30% of food is lost or wasted from farm to fork. As new technologies that are economically sustainable, scalable, and rapidly deployable to market are needed to address these challenges, an opportunity lies for biomaterials to lead innovation in the agro-food industry. Our laboratory strives to reinvent silk proteins as advanced materials for boosting food security. Here, we will highlight recent developments in the nanomanufacturing of silk to design: (i) physical unclonable functions for food traceability, (ii) packaging that is biodegradable yet possess good membrane proprieties, sense spoilage and mitigate biotic decay, (iii) microenvironments that boost seed germination in marginal land, and (iv) different solutions to precisely deliver payloads in planta. These examples will provide an opportunity to discuss how the establishment of a prolonged biointerface between biomaterials and plants tissues requires the development of basic scientific knowledge on material-plant host response, mechanics of disorder-to-order transitions in proteinaceous materials during condensation phenomena, fluid mechanics, and transport phenomena in plants vasculature, and swelling of porous materials exposed to plant fluids.