A major barrier for plant genetic engineering is the delivery of genetic materials across the multilayered cell wall into the cell nucleus. The cell wall is a porous layer of cellulose and pectin polysaccharides with pore sizes of 3.5-9.2 nm. Natural mechanisms such as Agrobacterium tumefaciens and plant viruses or physical delivery methods such as particle bombardment ('gene gun') and silicon carbide whiskers have been used to deliver genetic cargos into plant cells. However, these methods can be labor-intensive, time-consuming, and biotic methods suffer from limited plant host range whereby abiotic methods have low efficiencies, which complicates and limits their uses for plant engineering. Employing nanotechnology to deliver bio-reagents and genetic cargos via cell wall pores may address some of these current limitations.