What if a houseplant could fight indoor pollution?
Neoplants wants plants and their microbes to metabolize indoor pollutants. Its journey from engineered pothos to a microbial consumer product reveals why the room is a harder test than the laboratory.
A different job for a familiar plant
A houseplant that treats pollution as food is a more interesting proposition than a houseplant that merely decorates a room. Neoplants, a Paris-based biotechnology company, is pursuing that distinction: living systems designed to metabolize selected airborne chemicals, rather than simply coexist with them. Its ambition turns an everyday object into a question about what domestic biotechnology might become.
The original expression of that idea was Neo P1, unveiled in 2022: an engineered pothos paired with a pollutant-consuming microbiome around its roots. The company proposed changing both the plant and its microbial companions. Leaves would be only the visible part of a system whose useful work also happened below the soil surface.
That original proposition needs an important qualification. Neo P1 remains a development project, not an established, widely deployed household appliance. Neoplants subsequently brought a different system, Neo Px, to market. Understanding the distance between those two products is essential to understanding both the company’s ingenuity and the evidence still required of it.
The pollution a particle filter does not solve
Indoor air is not one problem. It contains particles and gases, arising from outdoor pollution as well as cooking, cleaning, furnishings and building materials. Neoplants concentrates on volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. Its original Neo P1 program targeted formaldehyde and aromatic compounds including benzene, toluene and xylene: chemicals that require a different treatment strategy from dust or pollen.
This distinction matters because a particle filter is not automatically a gas-removal device. The US Environmental Protection Agency distinguishes between filtering particles and removing gases; an air cleaner’s usefulness depends on what it is designed to capture. Neoplants is therefore addressing a particular category of contamination, not offering a biological answer to every indoor-air concern.
The practical baseline is less photogenic than an engineered plant. EPA guidance puts reducing pollution sources and ventilating with clean outdoor air ahead of supplemental filtration. Any biological product has to earn a place alongside those measures. It should not become a reason to overlook an emitting material, inadequate ventilation or a different pollutant altogether.
Engineering an ecosystem, not just a leaf
Neo P1 starts with Epipremnum aureum, the familiar pothos. According to Neoplants, its plant-engineering work adds metabolic capabilities intended to convert pollutants into materials the organism can use. The company describes pathways for turning formaldehyde into sugars and aromatic pollutants into amino-acid building blocks. This is a biochemical design claim, not evidence by itself of a cleaner occupied room.
The second component is microbial. Neoplants says it selected bacteria capable of using pollutants and enhanced their performance through directed evolution. Its Neo P1 account describes two strains specialized in formaldehyde or BTEX compounds, introduced around the roots. Instead of treating the soil as a passive support, the design makes it part of the treatment system.
The difficulty is coordinating several living processes. The plant needs to remain healthy, the microorganisms need to persist, and airborne molecules need to reach the parts that can consume them. Neoplants’ planter design accordingly emphasizes airflow toward the soil as well as watering. A useful metabolic pathway is only one link in a chain that must function reliably outside controlled experiments.
Two founders looking for a tangible use
Lionel Mora and Patrick Torbey started Neoplants in 2018. Reporting by Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News describes Mora leaving Google and Torbey bringing a background in genetics and genome editing. They met through Entrepreneur First, an incubator that brought scientific and commercial experience together. Mora became chief executive; Torbey became chief technology officer.
Their starting point was a desire to make something with an environmental purpose and a practical route into people’s lives. According to that reporting, they wanted an initial product rather than research whose application would remain distant. Indoor air offered a bounded first use for a broader interest in giving plants additional functions.
Even that bounded task demanded foundational work. In TechCrunch’s account of the 2022 unveiling, Torbey described having to sequence and annotate the pothos genome. The familiar appearance of a trailing houseplant obscures the technical effort underneath it. Choosing a recognizable organism does not make its biology a ready-made engineering platform.
The houseplant claim meets the room
The scientific obstacle is not whether plants can remove some pollutants. It is whether their removal rate matters in a real building. In a paper published online in November 2019, Bryan E. Cummings and Michael S. Waring reviewed 12 studies and converted 196 experimental results into clean air delivery rates, a metric that makes laboratory findings easier to compare with room-scale air exchange.
The median rate was 0.023 cubic metres per hour per plant. Their analysis estimated that matching the VOC removal already supplied by typical outdoor-to-indoor air exchange would require roughly 10 to 1,000 plants per square metre of floor space. Small sealed chambers, where concentrations can fall over many hours or days, do not reproduce the competing flows and continuing emissions of an occupied building.
That review did not test Neo P1, which was announced later, and cannot settle the performance of an engineered system. It does establish the burden of proof. Neoplants’ claim of performance up to 30 times that of ordinary plants is a relative comparison. Without an absolute removal rate and realistic operating conditions, a large multiplier does not establish that one pot meaningfully changes household exposure.
What reached customers, and what did not
The subsequent product history is more instructive than the original announcement. AFP reported that Neoplants began selling its first products in the United States in April 2024. That commercial system was Neo Px. As WIRED explained in its review, it uses an ordinary Marble Queen pothos; the engineered component is the microbial treatment supplied as Power Drops, not the plant’s genome.
Neo Px combines the plant, a planter and recurring microbial additions. Neoplants recommends replenishing Power Drops to maintain the system, creating an ongoing care requirement beyond keeping a vine alive. This is a different proposition from purchasing a permanently enhanced plant: the customer is maintaining a plant–microbe arrangement, with consumables as part of the product.
For Neo P1, the company’s own update is unusually consequential. Neoplants says testing of its first 2023 version revealed significant performance variation, prompting further work on the engineered plant. It also says USDA approval remains ongoing. Those are company-reported development and regulatory statuses, not independently verified regulatory decisions, and they do not justify describing Neo P1 as ready for release at scale.
Why Global58 noticed them
Global58 noticed Neoplants because it connects a serious technical question with an object people already understand. The editorial interest lies in the attempt to engineer a plant and its microbial surroundings as one working system, and in the unusually visible gap between laboratory capability and everyday usefulness. Our classification is not a ranking or endorsement.
The business also makes an illuminating distinction between a research ambition and a product that can reach customers sooner. Neo Px puts the microbiome into use without waiting for the fully engineered Neo P1 plant. That is a concrete commercial step, but it should not be mistaken for delivery of the original biological design.
The evidence supports a company that has developed a consumer product and continues to iterate on a more ambitious one. It does not establish a population-level health benefit, predictable results across homes or equivalence to a conventional air-cleaning appliance. Keeping those boundaries visible makes the company more interesting to examine, not less.
The next test is ordinary life
The useful next milestone is not another comparison with an untreated houseplant. It is transparent evidence of absolute pollutant removal under conditions that resemble homes: realistic concentrations, continuing emissions, documented ventilation and measurements over time. Independent replication would help separate a promising metabolic mechanism from a dependable intervention.
The commercial questions are similarly concrete. How consistently can customers maintain the microbiome? How does performance change between replenishments? Can manufacturing reproduce the same results across living systems? The company’s acknowledgment of variation in Neo P1 makes consistency a central issue rather than a minor detail. Its Neo Px product page also displayed an out-of-stock notice when reviewed, which should not be read as evidence of either demand or production capacity.
Neoplants matters as an attempt to make biology do a specific domestic job. Whether that attempt becomes a useful air-quality tool will depend on measured performance, not the appeal of the idea. A plant that can consume a pollutant is fascinating. A system that reliably reduces exposure in an occupied room is the harder, more consequential achievement to demonstrate.
See something that needs correcting? Contact the Global58 editorial team.
