Can A GMO Plant Become Your Latest Household Helper?

You have probably heard that many plants have the ability to purify indoor air. Spider Plant, Peace Lily, Aloe Vera, Snake Plant, Boston Fern, and Chrysanthemums are all known for their air quality-boosting benefits. In addition, NASA’s iconic 1989 Clean Air Study found that house plants can reduce harmful airborne chemicals, dust, and germs. But one company wants to take this concept even further. They have engineered plants to detoxify the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in various household products, materials, and furniture.

Neoplants was founded in 2018 in Paris by Lionel Mora and Patrick Torbey. The French duo bonded over a common mission to unite aesthetics with functionality. They were inspired by the potential of biology to give common items entirely new functions—such as house plants that inconspicuously carry out the important task of cleaning the air while you relax and simply enjoy their beauty. So, they created a startup that has been working on designing genetically modified houseplants that can neutralize common indoor air pollutants like benzene and formaldehyde.

After over four years of research, Neoplants unveiled their first product (which you can pre-order for $179) last fall. The GMO plant, called Neo P1, is a pothos variety you commonly see decorating houses and offices. This beautiful trailing plant with heart-shaped leaves tolerates low light and minimal watering, making it a convenient choice for casual houseplant growers. But the plant does not work alone: an integral part of the design is the microbiome of the soil in which it grows. Neoplants scientists added bacteria that are naturally good at detoxifying benzene and toluene and evolved them to be even more efficient. When you order their product, it comes with this special soil, which you can replenish periodically as the plants grow.

Improving on Nature

If you are relying on traditional plant varieties to do the job of air purification, you would need a lot of them to have any noticeable effect: “Plants have interesting phytoremediation capabilities that allow them to absorb pollutants, but significant impact only takes place if dozens of them are present in a single room,” says Patrick Torbey, CTO & Co-Founder of Neoplants. “This caveat often gets overlooked and is what we set out to address when developing Neo P1.”

Conventional air purifiers are also not the perfect solution: they can capture particles but not small organic molecules. This is why Neoplants focused on a group of indoor air pollutants that mechanical air purifiers cannot capture. And they are ready to put the green heroes to the test: Neoplants is using NASA’s benchmark study to assess the ability of their engineered plants to reduce pollutant concentration.

A team of 20 PhDs conducted an experiment in collaboration with Ecole Mines-Télécom of Lille University, one of France’s leading facilities for indoor air quality testing, comparing regular plants and their GMO counterparts. The results were astounding: Neoplants’ engineered plant babies were 30 times more effective at reducing selected volatile pollutants than the plants analyzed in the famous NASA Clean Air Study. Neoplants announced the results of the study at the SynBioBeta2023 conference yesterday.

“Testing Neo P1’s efficacy against longstanding benchmarks established by NASA was an ambitious – albeit necessary – initiative to measure years of bioengineering efforts in our mission to improve indoor air,” commented Torbey. “Our comparative analysis quantifies Neo P1’s greatly enhanced performance when capturing volatile organic compounds, and also demonstrates the possibilities that plant synthetic biology has today, and the promises for tomorrow, to positively impact our health and the environment.”

Saving the world with GMOs

Last October, Neoplants raised $20 million in a seed funding round led by Heartcore Capital, a VC firm that backs founder building category-defying brands and products. Other leading technology investors, including True Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Partech, and Entrepreneur First, helped fund the startup’s work on Neo P1, as well as the construction of a new 12,000-square-foot laboratory for engineering the future of plants. Because air purification is not the only thing they are after—Neoplants is also working on developing plants for carbon capture.

Another company that uses plant synthetic biology is Living Carbon. The California company is engineering trees to capture and store carbon more effectively. These “supertrees” have been engineered to have more efficient photosynthesis, the process whereby plants convert CO2 into energy they use for growth. This way, the carbon from the atmosphere gets stored in the tree’s trunk, branches, and leaves. Not only do supertrees grow faster, but they are also more resistant to degradation, which means the stored carbon is retained in solid form longer.

Unfortunately, GMO acceptance is lagging behind the research. Although engineering plants can improve food security by protecting crops from disease and making them more resistant to climate change, extensive regulation adds an additional layer of challenge to adopting these new technologies. The GM crops adopted in agriculture (such as alfalfa, apples, canola, cotton, papayas, potatoes, soybean, golden rice, and salmon) took years to approve, and the general public remains skeptical of the new technology.

Companies like Neoplants are trying to change that perception with applications that can convince people to give GMOs a try. Another company working on a similar effort is Light Bio. The startup is creating glow-in-the-dark houseplants, which they exhibited at the SynBioBeta 2022 conference. Their glow-in-the-dark petunias were approved for sale this year. The company founders believe glowing plants will become an iconic milestone in the public perception of synthetic biology.

Perhaps Neoplants’ Neo P1, like its famous namesake, can help us break out of the matrix by changing people’s perception of GMOs.

Thank you to Katia Tarasava for additional research and reporting on this article. I’m the founder of SynBioBeta, and some of the companies I write about, such as Neoplants, Living Carbon, and Light Bio, are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference. For more content, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter and follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.