6 ms·
Scientists solve 200-year-old puzzle of how tobacco plants make nicotine
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-72705-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-72705-0
- SwtCyber 5mo agoThe glucose part is especially interesting: the missing step wasn't just an unknown enzyme, but a transient intermediate that basically disappears by the end
- x______________ 5mo agoYou may enjoy the original paper[0] a lot more, the simplified article is very... simple. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-72705-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-72705-0
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- hyrix 5mo agoPairs well with https://phys.org/news/2026-04-tobacco-psychedelics-psilocybin-dmt.html https://phys.org/news/2026-04-tobacco-psychedelics-psilocybi... !
- dr_dshiv 5mo agoIt would be great if they could improve upon it. I find nicotine to be an underperforming chemical, despite its popularity. A bit more of a cognitive kick would be nice. Know what I mean?
- NDlurker 5mo agoI know there's at least one nicotine analogue that's been sold. Pretty sure it's carcinogenic, but maybe there are some other options.
- jrflowers 5mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Acacia_species_known_to_contain_psychoactive_alkaloids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Acacia_species_known_t...
- mikeweiss 5mo agoYour talking about cocaine right?
- bitmasher9 5mo agoThis isn’t how drug discovery works at all.
- nine_k 5mo agoModafinil? Ritalin? The latter is great for tedious tasks.
- dr_dshiv 5mo ago“1 hour, full power” is the dream. Something where I could get those last things done in the evening without disrupting my sleep. Chemically possible? Why not?
- DANmode 5mo agoLots of drugs will get you where you’re looking to go. Going to bed and waking up an hour earlier, working immediately upon wakefulness, will keep you there.
- MajorTakeaway 5mo ago"The star that burns twice as bright lasts half as long, Roy."
- esperent 5mo agoIt's also great for totally messing up your brain chemistry and your reward wiring. Wouldn't touch it myself. I'm sure if you did it once or twice a year it'd be fine but let's be real, anyone who's willing to take it in the first place (outside of having a genuine medical reason like narcolepsy/ADHD) will want to take it a lot more than that. Besides, in the long run - measured over weeks or months - these absolutely will not give you a productivity boost anyway comparable to sorting out your sleep/exercise/diet/mental health.
- cmrdporcupine 5mo agoADHD stimulants promised a lot in terms of motivation -- but only made me do the thing I already wanted to do instead of work... more. So instead of plugging away on house work or chores or my employer's boring work, I was building compilers and databases from scratch at 3am, unable to sleep. And then I checked my blood pressure. Oops. Also seemed directly implicated in a loved one of mine acquiring an eating disorder. 1/10 would not recommend.
- SwtCyber 5mo agoI get what you mean, but "more addictive stimulant with a stronger cognitive kick" is one of those product requirements that starts to sound less appealing the longer you think about it
- karunamurti 5mo agoAnd the implication is they can modify tomato's DNA to produce nicotine, just like Tomacco from The Simpsons. The Simpsons always predict everything.
- someguyiguess 5mo agoSimpsons did it!
- mrdevlar 5mo agoI came here to find someone saying this. I swear we are heading toward McKenna's Peak Novelty in this timeline.
- goodmythical 5mo ago[flagged]
- tracerbulletx 5mo agoHow exactly would they ask that question 10,000 years ago if they didn't know what molecules were, much less nicotine?
- galleywest200 5mo agoA curious question. Those same people also bred brassica oleraceae into so many different crops so they had to have SOME idea of how plants worked. Maybe they did not attribute it to molecules but growing conditions or locations, or something. Either way somebody somewhere wondered about this before 1820.
- furyofantares 5mo ago"They wondered how it worked" is different than "they wondered how it produced nicotine", what with "nicotine" being the name of the molecule.
- someguyiguess 5mo ago[flagged]
- pjc50 5mo agoHumans have definitely had some understanding of selective breeding for a long time, but only partial understanding of recessive genes and the risks of inbreeding (almost all societies have incest taboos, but that didn't stop the Habsburg lip).
- bicx 5mo agoWell, the author specifically mentions the puzzle of how it produces nicotine. Nicotine was first identified and isolated as a chemical in 1828, based on a quick google. So, no one was wondering about nicotine production before then because they didn’t know what it was.
- storus 5mo agoParadoxically, nicotine has some medical use in e.g. displacing viral debris and autoantibodies from nAChR (nicotinic acetylcholine receptors) due to having highest affinity to these receptors, which seems to help with (long) Covid; "smoker paradox" in lower covid-related hospitalizations.
- DANmode 5mo agoGreat to see this here. CIGS are bad, nicotine is pretty neutral to good, as a lozenge or patch or gum. Edit: Nicotine can be way more medically relevant than “less bad”. Not sure what the person replying to me is even on about, tbh
- Aloha 5mo agoReally inhaling something burning is bad. Pretty much every other form of tobacco that is not cigarettes is less bad.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- cromka 5mo agoInhaling? We're talking about a compound here, not tobacco.
- falcor84 5mo agoThe HN guidelines say "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says". The way I understand it is that different people on the thread often have different ways of thinking about the topic, and we shouldn't dismiss something because it's not what "we" were talking about. In this case, it was obvious to you that the parent was talking about smoking tobacco, right? So you can either engage with it, or not, but there's no need to reject someone's comment for not adhering to what you decided is the topic.
- jandom 5mo ago“Glucose appears to vanish” i’m sure it does, the matter just does that
- zamadatix 5mo agoGlucose appears to vanish around me as well.
- dav_Oz 5mo agoFor context the Cell paper published several weeks before [0][1] provides a more bird's eye view (multi-omics etc.) the Nature paper here is very hands on providing x-ray crystal structures etc. So both complement each other well. [0]https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674%2826%2900335-1 https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674%2826%2900335-1 [1]https://phys.org/news/2026-04-nicotine-biosynthesis-wild-tobacco-mystery.html https://phys.org/news/2026-04-nicotine-biosynthesis-wild-tob...