Markita Landry, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and neuroscience at UC Berkeley and recipient of one of the inaugural CITRIS Innovation Fellowship and AIC Awards, is the first to admit that the two applications her research addresses – imaging brain chemistry and delivering genetic material into plants – are rather divergent.
Her team is known for creating chemical probes for neurotransmitter and neuromodulator molecules, to allow them to study the brain in both health and disease, but a chance finding in the testing phase of an unrelated experiment led to significant discoveries about how plants internalize nanoparticles.
Her CITRIS Innovation Fellowship and AIC Award project will work to explore and ultimately commercialize nanotechnology strategies to deliver nucleic acids and proteins to plant germline tissue for rapid crop bioengineering. She was also named the chemical science laureate at the 2024 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists in the U.S.