I’m Stuart Strand, Research Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. For 20 years, 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 create house plants that can purify the air in your house.

The air in your home may have more benzene and chloroform (two cancer causing pollutants) than is allowed in the workplace. Every time you park your car in an attached garage or take a shower you are adding benzene and chloroform to your home air.

Rabbits have an enzyme in their liver (2E1) that grabs onto chloroform and benzene and gets oxygen from the air to burn up the pollutants. We have lab plants with the 2E1 gene that can remove chloroform and benzene 20 times faster than the untransformed plants. Now we want to take the rabbit enzyme and put it into a common houseplant, 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 could do the job with only a few plants per room.
If you’re interested, take a look at our project website,

http://www.indiegogo.com/SuperPothos/x/1889244?c=home”