Vol 026–Here’s How Bioengineered Plants Are Going to Save Your Life

1 oz of water to garden your health

2 Tools for growth

1 Cool Product

Random Musings

Reading Time: 4 minutes and 13 seconds

This week’s newsletter is brought to you by plants 🪴

I have so many houseplants (that reminds me, I need to water them). They provide stress-relieving benefits, remove CO2 from the air, and provide food, fiber, building materials, fuel, and pharmaceuticals.

Without plants, we’d die from CO2 poisoning after about 2 1/2 months!

And that’s just from the plants we can see. What about the plants we can’t see? The ones that we’re not even sure are plants?

The ones that are being grown in cleanrooms, with their DNA manipulated in ways that would make sci-fi writers blush?

These are the plants that are going to save our lives.

Action to water your health

Our calendars are overwhelmingly jam-packed with to-dos, meetings, distractions, and ongoing obligations.

We forget the simplicity and complexity of those things around us. More importantly, we miss opportunities to create. Or we give up after a couple of years.

Take, for example, the humble houseplant.

You might not have given them a second thought in recent years, but they’re actually one of the most important tools we have for cleaning the air in our homes and offices.

According to a study by NASA, common houseplants like gerbera daisies, aloe vera, and snake plants can remove up to 87% of air toxins in 24 hours.

Let’s look at a French startup Neoplants. The founders saw the simplicity and complexity in plants and thought “ why can’t we genetically modify houseplants and their soil microbiome to absorb their surrounding pollutants and create a mini-ecosystem that has never been done before?”

That’s exactly what they did. They now have $20 million in funding. Let’s look into how they created a new bioengineered plant, that undoubtedly will change the future.

Neoplants are designed genetically modified houseplants so that they can absorb air pollutants.

They have a white paper (science manual of sorts) on their website that is 18-pages long if you want to read it. Here are the highlights.

Neo P1. This is their hero plant product. It captures volatile organic compounds (VOC). includes:

• Formaldehyde

• Benzene

• Toulene

• Sylene

The plant's shell is designed to allow maximum air intake.

It captures and recycles air pollutants, 30 times more powerful than the most depolluting regular houseplants.

Metabolism Engineering. They use the plant species Epipremnum aureum also known as “devils Ivy” because it is almost impossible to kill, and it stays green even when kept in the dark.

They used transgenesis, inserting extra genes, enabling the plant to produce enzymes with a new function:

Turning pollutants into plant matter (aka metabolism engineering).

Soil. The researchers genetically engineered the bacteria in the soil using directed evolution, to maximize the depollution efficiency of the biological system.

They targeted bacteria that could use formaldehyde as a sole carbon very efficiently and others that could do the same with BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene). These organisms are harmless to humans and animals.

HEPA Filters. I own one, they are good at targeting particulate matter (PM). But this technology cannot filter out VOCs, as these compounds usually do not exceed 1 nanometer in diameter, a thousand times smaller than ultrafine particles (PM1) HEPA filters operating at the micrometer scale.

Companies have developed other technologies to filter VOCs (here’s a comprehensive list). But most have significant drawbacks, and in some cases can lead to more pollution generated than remediated.

I don’t know about you. But this is exciting stuff.

The process of creating such a plant is insanely complex. But its core idea is simple.

Tools for growth

Futureme: Write a letter to your future self. This could be once a year, a month, or daily. You can choose to include goals, changes you want in the future, or reflect on things. 

Here are some examples. Going to start doing this and see how it goes.

Avatar AI: You can create your own AI-generated avatars. They look so realistic and awesome. 

Before you use this website or any other AI-generated avatar, make sure:

This is so important as you may end up as a deep fake!

Cool Product

Infinity Cube: A mini gadget fidget spinner. Something nice about it... but warned that it might annoy others.

Random Musings

1. Life is finite, we are but a speck of dust. True, but also, remember that time you stubbed your toe? Yeah, it hurt. You can have both perspectives and that's ok. Your mental, physical, and spiritual feeling are real. Stop pushing them aside.

2. Would you like to see a product review on athletic greens or Asystems? Here are some examples of my previous ones.

3. Laungitas hoppy refresher is sparkling hoppy water. I know it sounds weird, But it tastes so refreshing. When I don't feel like drinking beer or I'm on-call for work, I drink one of these.

4. What's the one part of your morning routine that you can't live without? for me it's meditation. If I don't do it. My entire day feels off.

5. Midterm Elections are November 8th. Don't forget to mail in your ballots or vote in person!

You're an awesome human

Martin, CEO of braincrumbss

Stuff I created, that you might find helpful.

1. I created a sleep 💤 course. After reading books, research studies, blogs, and podcasts, I wrote a post that includes a sneak preview of the content too 💤💤

2. This product is free. It is the most comprehensive tool for digital nomads who end up with diarrhea 💩. How to treat it, when to worry, and what to pack. Everything. I spent an embarrassing amount of time writing this.