This Gene-Edited Plant Purifies Your Indoors So Well That You Inhale Clean Air With Every Breath
If only you could get an air-inspecting sensor, you’d discover that the air you breathe inside your home is swirling and lapping with a menagerie of sinister little dust and dirt particles, scientifically called "Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs)." Neoplants, a futuristic company, has developed an innovative product that can soak up this impurity and purify the air without any toxic chemical side effects. The product uses bacteria which has a strong appetite for VOCs to filter out these chemicals like tea pouring through a sieve, leaving boiled tea leaves in the sieve cup.
Impurities lurking in indoor air
According to the EPA, the indoor air quality is ten times poorer than the outdoor air quality. Bubbly chemical particles wafting from the gas stove in your kitchen, the fumes spewed by your lipstick, the whirlwind of nasty compounds exploding from your talcum powder, and newly polished furniture. These VOCs inadvertently linger in the indoor air, pilfering its purity unbeknownst to the humans inhaling it.
Neoplants founders Patrick Torbey and Lionel Mora believed that simply opening windows or spraying disinfectants was not a sufficient measure to improve the air quality and purify the indoor air. They needed something that could revolutionize the air-purifying process. So, they turned their focus on nature and biology, particularly genetic engineering and microbiome plant science. “It’s like a biologist’s wet dream,” Torbey exclaimed in a conversation with WIRED.
Gene-editing laboratory in Paris
Stretching for about 1,200 square metres in Paris’ Saint-Quen-sur-Seine, there is an abandoned shoe factory revamped as a laboratory for this multi-million dollar Parisian startup. The laboratory, named “The Seed,” is flanked by terrazzo-floored glasshouses and chambers whose shelves are slung with plants in little glass tubes, creepy-looking organisms in frozen glass dishes, spooky-looking mass spectrometers, magnetic stirrers, fume cupboards, plants nestling inside jelly-like mediums that glow as the switches are tapped on and the lights concentrate on them. Some of these are baby plants, while some are strands of VOC-eating bacteria.
First-of-its-kind air-purifying plant
One chamber reveals Neo P1, a first-of-its-kind genetically-modified plant that claims to soak up the indoor air pollution and sweep the ghosts, a.k.a. impurities, from the air you breathe every moment of your life. The trick they employed is to modify the plants’ DNA by bathing them in a layer of VOC-loving bacteria, also called “power drops,” as Torbey explained in the PLUGHITZLIVE podcast.
This layer of bacteria will seep inside the plant and improve its capacity to absorb nasty chemicals from your air, leaving it purified, fresh, and breathable. "What we care about is putting nature at the center of innovation again," Torbey told Business Insider. You can also buy a planter for Neo P1, called "The Shell," according to a Facebook post.
Bacterium with an appetite for VOCs
Although non-engineered houseplants also have considerable air-purifying abilities, it would take hundreds and thousands of these plants to purify the air in a small apartment. This means you can’t trust your air unless you are babysitting a whole wild jungle in your house. Don’t even think of big houses. Torbey and Mora wanted to create something that was relatively simpler. They focused on a bacterium called “Pseudomonas putida,” which is known for its voracious appetite for common VOC chemicals like benzene, toluene, and xylene.
Power drops: Tiny air-purifying machines
These bacteria, they explained, can feed on these chemicals, eating up the carbon and fully disintegrating them into sugars and amino acids. "These are like tiny, tiny air purifying machines that build more air purifying machines the more pollution there is," Torbey reflected. It takes around six months to reproduce each plant from a single cell to one with a few inches of height through this entire gene-editing process.
Already, more than 30,000 people have signed up for the product waiting list, including hoteliers and real estate developers. “It will be the first time in history that such a product exists,” Mora shared with WIRED, and added, “The first computers, they weren’t so great. But they were revolutionary.” These little power drops are not just bundles of bacteria-oozing power; they are the life-drops of the future. Because air is all we have to sustain our breaths.
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