The more you learn about the world of scientific research, the more you begin to understand how many seemingly basic questions researchers have never been able to answer. For instance, people have been smoking tobacco for centuries and getting addicted to the nicotine inside it. Nicotine was isolated from tobacco in 1828, and now you can vape it, chew it as a gum, or absorb it as a patch or packet. Yet we still aren’t totally sure where nicotine comes from, or how tobacco plants have the ability to make it.
According to a new study published in Nature Communications, scientists finally have an answer.
For decades, researchers understood the ingredients involved in nicotine production but couldn’t figure out the exact recipe. Nicotine is built from two separate chemical components that have to be fused together inside the plant. Scientists suspected several enzymes were involved, but as for how the whole process works in concert, they had no idea.
Now they know why: the tobacco plant was playing tricks on them.
Tobacco Plants Expertly Hide Their Nicotine
Researchers from the University of York and the University of Copenhagen discovered that tobacco plants temporarily attach a glucose molecule (a sugar) to one of nicotine’s building blocks. The sugar is there to help the process, making the difficult reaction possible. Once its job is done, the glucose disappears entirely, leaving no trace in the final nicotine molecule.
In other words, they were missing the key to understanding the entire process because it was deleting all evidence of its own existence.
The team was able to identify the enzymes that add and remove that sugar molecule, finally giving them the full picture of the pathway tobacco uses to make nicotine. Generations of scientists were losing their minds trying to figure out what they were getting about the note nicotine development process in the tobacco plant, not knowing that they were looking for a step in the process that ceases to exist as soon as it’s done.
As for practical application for this discovery, there are relatives of tobacco plants that are used to make vaccines and medicines. The nicotine can contaminate those products, but removing the nicotine is expensive. Understanding how the nicotine even gets there in the first place could allow researchers down the line to shut that process off at the genetic level, leaving a plant with only the positives and none of the negatives.
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