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It may look like an innocent green plant, but its name brings to mind something much closer to a robot or an interstellar rocket.

Neo Px is a bioengineered plant capable of purifying indoor air on an unprecedented scale, the first in a potentially long line of such superpowered organisms.

“It’s the equivalent of up to 30 regular houseplants in terms of air purification,” said Lionel Mora, co-founder of startup Neoplants.

“It will not only capture, but also remove and recycle some of the most harmful pollutants you can find indoors.”

Five years ago, the entrepreneur met Patrick Torby, a genome editing researcher who dreamed of creating living organisms “with functions”.

“We had plants around us, and we thought the most powerful function we could add to them was to purify the air,” Mora said during a tour of a rented greenhouse in Lodi, California, two hours from San Francisco.

Protected from the elements, several thousand modified pothos plants, speckled in green and white, waited their turn to be potted, packed and shipped.

The French startup began selling its first products in the US in April.

The United States was a particularly promising first market, as many Americans already use air purifiers extensively.

“We’re doing our best to send as many plants as possible each week, but so far it’s not enough to meet the demand,” Mora said.

Forest fires

Americans greatly value cleaner air given all the recent “wildfire issues” that have become a “bigger and bigger” problem in the country, Mora said.

“One of the pollutants that comes from burning 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 organic compounds, or VOCs.

VOCs are gaseous pollutants that can accumulate indoors and have a negative impact on air quality and health.

Opening windows won’t help much because VOC pollution can come from solvents, adhesives and paints and therefore can hide in cleaning products, furniture and walls.

“These chemicals are associated with a number of adverse health effects, including cancer,” especially for the young, the elderly and people who are already vulnerable, said Tracy Woodruff, a professor of reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.

“They can lead to respiratory or reproductive health effects … such as adverse pregnancy outcomes, preterm birth, miscarriages, as well as neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease,” she said.

Neo Px itself does not absorb the chemicals. The plant is sold at a starting price of $120 in powder packets that contain a microbiome, essentially a strain of bacteria.

“This bacterium colonizes the roots, the soil and the leaves of the plant,” Torby, the company’s chief technology officer, said at its research laboratory in Saint-Ouen, France, just outside Paris.

Bacterial dust

The bacteria “absorb the VOCs to grow and reproduce. The plant is there to create this ecosystem for the bacteria. So we have a symbiotic system between the plants and the bacteria,” he said.

In the future, Neoplants plans to produce genetically modified plants whose metabolism will directly do the job of purifying the air.

And in the longer term, it hopes to tackle the problems of global warming.

“We can increase the capacity of trees to capture CO₂Torby said.

Or “develop seeds that are more drought tolerant,” Mora added.

Their vision, combined with the team’s scientific expertise, led Google product manager Vincent Nalatambi to invest in the startup from the start.

He now owns his own bacteria-enhanced pothos plant, which sits unnoticed in his San Francisco living room, already well stocked with houseplants of all sizes.

“Rather, my wife takes care of them, except for this one. That’s me!” he joked, pointing to his Neo Px.

“I’m often seduced by technological objects and want to bring them home,” he said.

“It was one of the first times I had no problem convincing my wife.