Negatively Charged Carbon Dots Employed Symplastic and Apoplastic Pathways to Enable Better Plant Delivery than Positively Charged Carbon Dots

Efficient delivery of nanoparticles (NPs) to plants is important for agricultural application. However, to date, we still lack knowledge about how NPs' charge matters for its translocation pathway, i.e., symplastic and apoplastic pathways, in plants. In this study, we synthesized and used negatively charged citrate sourced carbon dots (C-CDs, −37.97 ± 1.89 mV), Cy5 coated C-CDs (Cy5-C-CDs, −41.90 ± 2.55 mV), positively charged PEI coated carbon dots (P-CDs, +43.03 ± 1.71 mV), and Cy5 coated P-CDs (Cy5-P-CDs, +48.80 ± 1.21 mV) to investigate the role of surface charges and coatings on the employed translocation pathways (symplastic and apoplastic pathways) of charged NPs in plants. Our results showed that, different from the higher fluorescence intensity of P-CDs and Cy5-P-CDs in extracellular than intracellular space, the fluorescence intensity of C-CDs and Cy5-C-CDs was similar between intracellular and extracellular space in cucumber and cotton roots. It suggests that the negatively charged CDs were translocated via both symplastic and apoplastic pathways, but the positively charged CDs were mainly translocated via the apoplastic pathway. Furthermore, our results showed that root applied negatively charged C-CDs demonstrated higher leaf fluorescence than did positively charged P-CDs in both cucumber (8.09 ± 0.99 vs 3.75 ± 0.23) and cotton (7.27 ± 1.06 vs 3.23 ± 0.22), indicating that negatively charged CDs have a higher translocation efficiency from root to leaf than do positively charged CDs. It should be noted that CDs do not affect root cell activities, ROS level, and photosynthetic performance in cucumber and cotton, showing its good biocompatibility. Overall, this study not only figured out that root applied negatively charged CDs employed both symplastic and apoplastic pathways to do the transportation in roots compared with mainly the employment of apoplastic pathway for positively charge CDs, but also found that negatively charge CDs could be more efficiently translocated from root to leaf than positively charged CDs, indicating that imparting negative charge to NPs, at least CDs, matters for its efficient delivery in crops.