cleaning indoors air with plants

Use of indoor plants to clean inside room air is a nice idea. It is encouraging to see this is being pursued and that there is actually a product out there.

It's not clear that having the Neoplants pothos plant in your living room could actually have a significant impact in improving your health.  This could be just a get-rich quick scheme being promoted by a start-up that will soon fail.  Of course, one can hope that its not.

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from https://www.inverse.com/innovation/genetically-modified-houseplant-air-purifier: 

This pothos may look like any other houseplant, but it actually does the air-purifying work of 30 plants.Neoplants

FOR THOSE OF us with seasonal depression or anxiety, houseplants can offer immense comfort. In fact, adding loads of leafy things to your home has been shown to boost mood and relieve anxiety — in short, they help us (metaphorically) breathe a bit easier. But now, a specially designed plant can literally clear the air.

A Paris-based startup called Neoplants aims to harness the natural air-filtering properties of plants and turn them up to 11. By genetically engineering both a pothos (Epipremnum aureum) plant and its associated root microbiome, the team behind Neoplants created an organism they claim is capable of doing the air-purifying work of up to 30 plants. The company’s first high-tech houseplant, called Neo P1, recently hit the market.

HERE’S THE BACKGROUND — Volatile organic compounds (also known as VOCs) are highly reactive chemicals that are commonly found in things like paints, cleaning supplies, building materials, and pesticides. As a result, they tend to be abundant in indoor air. Unfortunately, they’re not particularly good for human health — VOCs are known to cause headaches, eye and throat irritation, and in some extreme cases, even liver damage or cancer.

The trouble is, most VOCs are very tiny molecules, which makes them extremely difficult to remove from indoor air with a mechanical filter. Even the molecules large enough to be filtered are simply removed and re-released in a different location, rather than neutralized or eliminated completely.

But plants have an advantage here over HEPA filters: Their small size means that VOCs can be absorbed and metabolized by greenery with relative ease. While a commonly cited 1989 NASA report claimed that plants can clear the air in a closed environment, more recent research found that flora only has a modest effect on these types of pollutants.

It turns out that plants just need a little metabolic tweaking to get the job done, according to the Neoplants team.

WHAT’S NEW — Neoplants’ first product is designed to please. “We started with one of the most popular houseplants in North America,” the pothos vine, which is also known as devil’s ivy, says Lionel Mora, the startup’s co-founder and chief executive officer.

To program the pothos vine to scrub the air, the team had to go where no lab had gone before. Most bioengineers start with a lab-friendly model organism, like Arabidopsis thaliana or Nicotiana benthamiana, whose genomes are mapped and annotated six ways to Sunday.

But the Neoplants team had to map the entire pothos genome themselves, and then determine which genes to target for maximum VOC filtration. “It’s like trying to build a plane while flying,” Torbey says.

The process took four years of near-constant work, but in the end, the engineers managed to create a plant that can metabolize four major indoor air pollutants, including formaldehyde and toluene. The customized flora can even absorb certain VOCs, like the carcinogen benzene, that are present in wildfire smoke.

But the real breakthrough came from modifying the microorganisms living in the plant’s roots. The team inserted genes from extremophile bacteria, which thrive in inhospitable environments by eating toxic chemicals, into these symbiotic microbes. This tweak in turn boosted the plant’s pollutant-metabolizing capacity.

And to ensure that they comply with FDA standards, the engineers were careful to avoid sections of the genome that could enhance the plant’s survival in the wild. “We don’t give a selective advantage to the plant. We don’t make it grow faster, we don’t increase its resistance to pesticides,” Torbey explains. “We’re not touching any of that.”

WHAT’S NEXT — At the moment, the Neoplant is a bit pricey. Neo P1 costs $179, far more expensive than most typical houseplants (though about on par with many mechanical air purifiers).

While the company only has one type of plant available right now, Neoplants is looking to develop a greater variety of VOC-filtering greenery in the future.

Now that the engineers know which genes to target and which tools to use, the process of customizing other houseplant species should be relatively straightforward, according to Torbey. “The cool thing about DNA is that it’s universal,” he says, “It’s easy to transfer technology from one plant to another.”

Down the road, Mora and Torbey hope that Neoplants could even help fight climate change. Although plants naturally pull excess carbon dioxide from the air via photosynthesis, the team believes that it may be possible to send photosynthesis into overdrive with the help of genetic engineering. Engineers could modify plants to capture and store vastly more carbon than they would naturally. This, Mora believes, could become a key strategy in climate mitigation.

“From what we see, carbon capture and storage is the most pressing issue,” Mora says. “And there is no way biology isn’t going to play a part in the solution.”

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An interview question to Lionel Mora, co-founder and CEO, and Patrick Torbey, CTO from an "Interesting Engineering" article:

How and why do you think you managed to better NASA in the bio-engineered plant stakes?

The plants tested in the NASA study in the late 80s were normal indoor plants, and they showed interesting phytoremediation characteristics. What we did is take one of those plants, Epipremnum aureum aka Pothos and engineer it in two main ways.

1. We inserted additional genes coding for enzymatic chains that allow the plant to integrate the most harmful VOCs ie. Formaldehyde, Benzene, Toluene and Xylene, in its endogenous carbon metabolism. In other words, we allow the plant to “breath in” these pollutants and use them in a similar way it uses CO2. 
2. We used directed evolution techniques to create strains of beneficial plant bacteria that are extremely efficient at degrading the same VOCs, and that are able to live symbiotically with Neo P1.