Scientists solve 200-year-old puzzle of how tobacco plants make nicotine (york.ac.uk)

You 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

Pairs well with https://phys.org/news/2026-04-tobacco-psychedelics-psilocybi... !

It 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?

And the implication is they can modify tomato's DNA to produce nicotine, just like Tomacco from The Simpsons. The Simpsons always predict everything.

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Paradoxically, 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.

“Glucose appears to vanish” i’m sure it does, the matter just does that

The glucose part is especially interesting: the missing step wasn't just an unknown enzyme, but a transient intermediate that basically disappears by the end

For 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

[1]https://phys.org/news/2026-04-nicotine-biosynthesis-wild-tob...