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Coordination: Bertrand Gakière

Industrial partner: NEOPLANTS

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs), the main pollutants in indoor air, are a public health problem because they are not treated efficiently by air purifiers. Many plants are able to assimilate formaldehyde, the major toxic VOC, and thereby detoxify it, and several metabolic engineering strategies has been shown to improve plant capacities to detoxify this compound. However, there are not yet indoor plants on the market that would allow individuals to detoxify their interiors from formaldehyde using a sustainable method. By combining the knowledge of the start-up NEOPLANTS in the field of VOC detoxification and its recently acquired ability to transform indoor plants such as Epipremnum sp, with the physiological, metabolic, metabolomics and the new ¹³C fluxomics skills of the IPS2 METABOACTIONS team, the project proposes to produce plants of commercial interest for the American market detoxifying VOC by combining technological approaches of ectopic overexpression of enzymatic steps from each of the partners and to characterize at a multilevel scale the lines thus created. For the first time ever, this project allows to draw a picture of metabolic routes involved in plant formaldehyde detoxification and will valorize NEOPLANTS as well as METABOACTIONS partners discoveries.