LIFE SCIENCES
Review Of Nanotechnology In Agriculture And Nanopesticides Materials In Controlling Insect Pests
by Magda Sabbour
ISBN Number : 978- 1-63040- 653-0
Authors Details
Author Name | Image | About Author |
---|---|---|
Magda Sabbour | Department of Pests and Plant Protection, National
Research Centre, Dokki, Cairo, Egypt |
Book Description
Nanotechnology the manipulation of matters at the scale of atoms and molecules, is rapidly converging with biotechnology and information technology to radically change food and agricultural systems. Over the next two decades, the impact of nano-scale convergence on farmers and food will exceed that farm mechanization or of the Green Revolution. Agriculture, according to the new nano-vision, needs to be more uniform, further automated, industrialized and reduced to simple functions. In our molecular future, the farm will be a wide area bio factory that can be monitored and managed from a computer and food will be crafted from designer substances delivering nutrients efficiently to the body. This review article is an attempt to identify the key nano-scale technologies which are reshaping our agricultural and food systems, and identifying the most recent scientific development in this vital field. Nanotechnology is a promising field of interdisciplinary research. It opens up a wide array of opportunities in various fields like medicine, pharmaceuticals, electronics and agriculture. The potential uses and benefits of nanotechnology are enormous. These include insect pests management through the formulations of nanomaterials-based pesticides and insecticides, enhancement of agricultural productivity using bio-conjugated nanoparticles (encapsulation) for slow release of nutrients and water, nanoparticle-mediated gene or DNA transfer in plants for the development of insect persistent varieties and use of nanomaterials for preparation of different kind of biosensors, which would be useful in remote sensing devices required for precision farming. Traditional strategies like integrated pest management used in agriculture are insufficient, and application of chemical pesticides like DDT have adverse effects on animals and human beings apart from the decline in soil fertility. Therefore, nano technology would provide green and efficient alternatives for the management of insect pests in agriculture without harming the nature. This review is focused on traditional strategies used for the management of insect pests, limitations of use of chemical pesticides and potential of nanomaterials in insect pest management as modern approaches of nanotechnology. The nanometer is often used to express dimensions on the atomic scales: the diameter of a helium atom, for example, is about 0.1 nm, and that of a ribosome is about 20 nm. In these uses, the nano metre appears to be supplanting the other common unit for atomic scale dimensions, the angstrom, which is equal to 0.1 nano metre. The world of materials science is witnessing a revolution in the exploration of matter at the small scale. Sub-atomic particles have been a fascination since the first half of the 20th century. High-energy accelerators allow us now to penetrate the constituents of sub-atomic particles. This is an ongoing quest. New and improved properties of materials whose constituting units are nanosized objects make one explore these objects in further detail. When matter at nanoscales can perform functions hitherto done by bulk materials and their assemblies, many things inconceivable in the past can be achieved. Imagine devices such as moving bodies 1000 times smaller than a bacterium. Imagine complex machines as small as a virus. In fact the virus itself is such a machine, created by nature. Obviously reducing dimension and consequent exploration of properties has no limit. This takes one to the famous, oftrepeated statement of Feynman, “there is plenty of room at the bottom.” One can start arranging molecules to achieve the functions of a complex machine. A future with controlled molecular assemblies of this kind, the molecular nanotechnology, will 1 Abstract 5 revolutionize everything—from food to thought will change with this newly acquired power. Atoms and typical molecules are a few angstroms long. That is 10–10 m or 10 billionth of a meter. Numbers of this kind are very hard to comprehend as they are not in everyday use. This length is as small as a millimeter if one were to take a wire stretched between Chennai and Kanyakumari, the southern tip of India. In order to understand 10–10, it is useful to imagine 1010, a number which is astronomically big. The distance of 1010 m is 10 million kilometers or it is 26 times the distance between the earth and the moon. Obviously no one, except astronauts, travel that kind of distances. In day-to-day life we feel distances of the order of meters and centimeters, the smallest distance one can see without instruments is 0.1 mm, or the thickness of a cotton fiber Lin (2007). This is 10–4 m. The distance of 10–10 m is a million times smaller, or it is about 1 mm if the cotton fiber were to be expanded to appear like a 100 m wide highway. We are talking about very small things, and consequently we need the right tools to see these objects. In order to get a nano object to function, it is necessary to assemble the constituent atoms or molecules, perhaps into a large single molecule such as a protein. These objects are of the size of a nanometer (10–9 m). The science of nanometer scale objects is nanoscience. The resulting technology is called nanotechnology. Nanotechnology involves achieving the capability to manipulate matter in a desired fashion, atom by atom. At this scale, the constituents of matter do functions, which are different from those of the constituents or bulk materials. While molecular properties bridge material functions at this interface, a wide gap opens up in our understanding of properties in this size domain. This makes it necessary to do additionalinvestigation. Obviously there are many surprises in such studies which make this areasientificallyfascinating.