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Abstract Current practices for delivering agrochemicals are inefficient, with only a fraction reaching the intended targets in plants. The surfaces of nanocarriers are functionalized with sucrose, enabling rapid and efficient foliar delivery into the plant phloem, a vascular tissue that transports sugars, signaling molecules, and agrochemicals through the whole plant. The chemical affinity of sucrose molecules to sugar membrane transporters on the phloem cells enhances the uptake of sucrose‐coated quantum dots (sucQD) and biocompatible carbon dots with β‐cyclodextrin molecular baskets (suc‐β‐CD) that can carry a wide range of agrochemicals. The QD and CD fluorescence emission properties allowed detection and monitoring of rapid translocation (<40 min) in the vasculature of wheat leaves by confocal and epifluorescence microscopy. The suc‐β‐CDs more than doubled the delivery of chemical cargoes into the leaf vascular tissue. Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP‐MS) analysis showed that the fraction of sucQDs loaded into the phloem and transported to roots is over 6.8 times higher than unmodified QDs. The sucrose coating of nanoparticles approach enables unprecedented targeted delivery to roots with ≈70% of phloem‐loaded nanoparticles delivered to roots. The use of plant biorecognition molecules mediated delivery provides an efficient approach for guiding nanocarriers containing agrochemicals to the plant vasculature and whole plants. 

Photosynthetic organisms are sources of sustainable foods, renewable biofuels, novel biopharmaceuticals, and next-generation biomaterials essential for modern society. Efforts to improve the yield, variety, and sustainability of products dependent on chloroplasts are limited by the need for biotechnological approaches for high-throughput chloroplast transformation, monitoring chloroplast function, and engineering photosynthesis across diverse plant species. The use of nanotechnology has emerged as a novel approach to overcome some of these limitations. Nanotechnology is enabling advances in the targeted delivery of chemicals and genetic elements to chloroplasts, nanosensors for chloroplast biomolecules, and nanotherapeutics for enhancing chloroplast performance. Nanotechnology-mediated delivery of DNA to the chloroplast has the potential to revolutionize chloroplast synthetic biology by allowing transgenes, or even synthesized DNA libraries, to be delivered to a variety of photosynthetic species. Crop yield improvements could be enabled by nanomaterials that enhance photosynthesis, increase tolerance to stresses, and act as nanosensors for biomolecules associated with chloroplast function. Engineering isolated chloroplasts through nanotechnology and synthetic biology approaches are leading to a new generation of plant-based biomaterials able to self-repair using abundant CO 2 and water sources and are powered by renewable sunlight energy. Current knowledge gaps of nanotechnology-enabled approaches for chloroplast biotechnology include precise mechanisms for entry into plant cells and organelles, limited understanding about nanoparticle-based chloroplast transformations, and the translation of lab-based nanotechnology tools to the agricultural field with crop plants. Future research in chloroplast biotechnology mediated by the merging of synthetic biology and nanotechnology approaches can yield tools for precise control and monitoring of chloroplast function in vivo and ex vivo across diverse plant species, allowing increased plant productivity and turning plants into widely available sustainable technologies.