SuperPothos

The air in your home may have more benzene and chloroform (two cancer causing pollutants) than the EPA allows in the workplace. Every time you park your car in an attached garage or take a shower you are increasing the levels of benzene and chloroform in your house. What can be done to protect our families, especially our children?

Our lab, supported by the National Institutes of Health, Dept of Defense, and the National Science Foundation, has successfully designed plants that clean up pollutants in contaminated soils and water. Now we want to extend these methods to create house plants that can purify the air in your house.

Rabbits have an enzyme in their liver (cytochrome P450 2E1) that grabs onto chloroform, benzene, carbon tetrachloride and styrene (all pollutants found in your home) and gets oxygen from the air to burn up the pollutants. We have functional prototype plants with the 2E1 gene expressed and functional in tobacco and poplar. Now we want to take the rabbit enzyme and put it into a common houseplants, pothos ivy, making SuperPothos plants to protect your family.

Ordinary plants have some ability to clean the air, but the amount of foliage required to have a significant impact on pollutants would be hundreds of plants per room! SuperPothos plants containing the rabbit enzyme could do the job with only a few plants per room. Pothos ivy is the perfect plant for this transformation since it can be easily grown by anyone, has abundant foliage, doesn't flower, and can be easily propagated by cuttings.

For further information click the gallery tab and download pdfs that provide you with a FAQ (answers to frequently asked questions), a full technical proposal, and a budget.

We have a team of scientists that are ready to transform these plants with the pollution fighting rabbit enzyme, but we need money. Please help us make these plants available to you.