Employing plants as discreet, self-sustaining sensors to warn of security threats
“Plants are highly attuned to their environments and naturally manifest physiological responses to basic stimuli such as light and temperature, but also in some cases to touch, chemicals, pests, and pathogens,” said Blake Bextine, the DARPA Program Manager for APT. “Emerging molecular and modeling techniques may make it possible to reprogram these detection and reporting capabilities for a wide range of stimuli, which would not only open up new intelligence streams, but also reduce the personnel risks and costs associated with traditional sensors.”
APT aims to go far beyond current practice, which tends to pursue only a minimal number of modifications. DARPA’s goal is to modify multiple and complex traits to give plants new capabilities that enable them to sense and report on numerous stimuli. To succeed, however, the program must also address how modified plants allocate internal resources and compete in natural environments. Past experiments of this type have reduced the fitness of modified plants by siphoning resources needed to sustain the plants. APT will seek to improve how plants collect and distribute resources, and optimize their fitness so that modified plants thrive despite anticipated interactions with natural stressors such as microbes, animals, insects, and other plants.
“Advanced Plant Technologies is a synthetic biology program at heart, and as with DARPA’s other work in that space, our goal is to develop an efficient, iterative system for designing, building, and testing models so that we end up with a readily adaptable platform capability that can be applied to a wide range of scenarios,” said Bextine.
It will be up to the researchers proposing to APT to determine which plants, stimuli, and modifications to pursue as proofs of concept.
Initial work on the program will take place in contained laboratory and greenhouse facilities, as well as simulated natural environments, and adhere to all applicable federal regulations with additional oversight from institutional biosafety committees. If the research is successful, later-phase field trials would take place under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service following all standard protocols for plant biosafety.
DARPA notes that APT will rely on existing ground-, air-, and space-based technology to remotely monitor plant reporting. Such systems are already capable of measuring plants’ temperature, chemical composition, reflectance, and body plan, among other qualities, from a standoff distance. The APT program will not fund development of new hardware for this purpose.
DARPA will hold a Proposers Day for APT on 21 December 2017, in Arlington, Virginia. The registration deadline is 6 December 2017. A detailed Special Notice is available at: https://go.usa.gov/xnB4M. Registration is available at: https://events.sa-meetings.com/APTProposersDay.
