The mission of the USDA is to “provide leadership on agriculture, food, natural resources, rural infrastructure, nutrition, and related issues through fact-based, data-driven, and customer-focused decisions.” This implies a commitment to sustain vibrant rural economies, healthy ecosystems, and a safe and secure food supply. The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored that this mission also intersects public health and worker safety, as essential workers in the agriculture and food industries are vulnerable to emerging infectious diseases. Addressing these challenges in the 21^st Century requires a suite of distributed technologies to monitor the natural world in real-time, analyze aggregated data in the context of the high biological and climatological complexity, and adaptively address threats and opportunities for improving desired outcomes. As cellular and molecular processes are foundational to all of these outcomes, realizing this potential will require new biosensor technologies, systematic study of nano scale processes and materials, remote networking, and artificial intelligence to provide decision support from complex aggregated data.

Nanotechnology and Biosensors address the mission of USDA in numerous intersecting ways. For example, simple, rapid, and affordable biosensor technologies are critical for rapidly identifying and responding to pathogen and pest outbreaks affecting people, plants, and animals, including the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Biosensors are also critical for quality control in bioprocessing, identification of environmental contaminants, and evaluating food safety and quality. Advances in biosensor performance are often predicated on novel nano materials, or exploitation of nanoscale phenomena. Advances in nanotechnology may also underlie effective technologies for delivery of therapeutic compounds and vaccines to safeguard the health of humans, plants, and animals. To this end we propose to renew a research project with the broad topic of Biosensors and Nanotechnology, with specific research effort addressing the following:

• Characterization of nanomaterials, including morphology, toxicity and its underlying mechanisms, stability, cellular uptake and transport, environmental fate and transformation, and interaction with biological organisms, materials, and other substances;


• Synthesis of one- and two-dimensional nanomaterials (e.g., graphene, phosphorene) via bottom-up or top-down approaches, with novel properties for applications such as improved biosensor performance, enhanced nutritional value, inhibition of bacterial growth or adhesion, or remediation of environmental contaminants; 


• Antimicrobial resistance, including sensors for detection and mitigation of multi-drug resistant pathogens, and investigation of novel antimicrobial nanomaterials and processes.


• Synthetic biology and engineered organisms, viruses, and nanoparticles for sensing applications, delivery of genes and therapeutic compounds, or vaccine development;


• Implementation of smart agriculture through remote sensor networks and “big data” approaches to systematically extract and analyze data generated from nanotechnology and nanomaterial-related research that are difficult to analyze using traditional data processing methods;


• Novel approaches for sensing and diagnosing emerging infectious diseases in plants, animals, humans, and in the environment.