ANN/THE STAR – It may look like an ordinary green plant, but its name suggests something more akin to a robot or an interstellar rocket.
Neo Px is a bio-engineered plant capable of purifying indoor air at an unprecedented scale. It’s the first in what could be a series of such super-powered organisms.
“It’s the equivalent of up to 30 regular houseplants in terms of air purification,” said co-founder Lionel Mora of the startup Neoplants. “It will not only capture, but also remove and recycle some of the most harmful indoor pollutants.”
Five years ago, entrepreneur Mora met genome editing researcher Patrick Torbey, who envisioned creating living organisms with enhanced functions.
“There were plants around us, and we thought that the most powerful function we could add to them was to purify the air,” said Mora, during a tour of a rented greenhouse in Lodi, California, two hours from San Francisco, in the United States (US).
Protected from the elements, several thousand modified pothos plants, green speckled with white, awaited their turn to be potted, packed and shipped.
The French startup began selling its first products in the US in April. The US was a particularly promising first market, since many Americans already widely use air purifiers.
“We do our best to send as many plants as possible every week, but it’s not enough to meet demand for now,” said Mora.
Americans have a keen appreciation for cleaner air given all the recent “problems associated with wildfires”, which have become a “bigger and bigger” problem in the country, Mora said.
“One of the pollutants that comes from combustion is benzene, which we’re targeting,” he added.
Indoor air can be two to five times more polluted than outdoor air, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, mainly due to volatile organicM compounds, or VOCs.
VOCs are gaseous pollutants that can accumulate indoors and negatively impact air quality and health.
Opening windows won’t help much because the VOC pollution can come from solvents, glues and paints, and therefore could lurk in cleaning products, furniture and walls.
“These chemicals are associated with a range of adverse health effects, including cancer”, especially for the young, the elderly and people who are already vulnerable,” said Tracey Woodruff, professor of reproductive sciences at the University of California.
“They can bring respiratory-related effects or reproductive health effects… like adverse pregnancy outcomes, pre term birth, miscarriages, as well as neurological disorders like Parkinson’s,” she said.
Neo Px does not itself absorb the chemicals. The plant is sold at a starting price of USD120 with packets of powder that contain a microbiome, essentially a bacterial strain.
“This bacteria colonises the plant’s roots, soil and leaves,” said Torbey, the company’s chief technology officer, at its research lab in Saint-Ouen, France. The bacteria “absorbs the VOCs to grow and reproduce. The plant is there to create this ecosystem for the bacteria.
So we have a symbiotic system between plants and bacteria”, he said.
In the future, Neoplants plans to produce genetically modified plants whose metabolism will directly do the work of air purification. And in the longer term, it hopes to tackle problems linked to global warming.
“We could increase the capacity of trees to capture carbon dioxide,” Torbey said. Or “develop seeds that are more resistant to drought”, added Mora.
He now owns his own bacteria-boosted pothos plant, which sits unnoticed in his San Francisco living room.
“It’s more my wife who takes care of them, except this one. This one’s me!” he said, pointing to his Neo Px.
“I’m often seduced by technological objects and I want to bring them home.”
