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Scientists solve 200-year-old puzzle of how tobacco plants make nicotine

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

8 hours agokarunamurti

I came here to find someone saying this.

I swear we are heading toward McKenna's Peak Novelty in this timeline.

an hour agomrdevlar

Simpsons did it!

7 hours agosomeguyiguess

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.

5 hours agostorus

Great 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

2 hours agoDANmode

Really inhaling something burning is bad.

Pretty much every other form of tobacco that is not cigarettes is less bad.

2 hours agoAloha

Inhaling? We're talking about a compound here, not tobacco.

an hour agocromka
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an hour ago

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

28 minutes agojandom

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?

8 hours agodr_dshiv

Modafinil? Ritalin? The latter is great for tedious tasks.

3 hours agonine_k

“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?

an hour agodr_dshiv

Lots 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.

2 minutes agoDANmode

Your talking about cocaine right?

6 hours agomikeweiss

I know there's at least one nicotine analogue that's been sold. Pretty sure it's carcinogenic, but maybe there are some other options.

8 hours agoNDlurker

This isn’t how drug discovery works at all.

4 hours agobitmasher9

The myopia required to claim that "The puzzle of how tobacco plants produce nicotine, however, has been around since the late 1820s" is egregious considering we've evidence attesting to tobacco use dating back twelve thousand years.

Does the author genuinely believe that no one wondered in the ten thousand years between our earliest example of tobacco use and 1820?

8 hours agogoodmythical

Well, 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.

8 hours agobicx

How exactly would they ask that question 10,000 years ago if they didn't know what molecules were, much less nicotine?

8 hours agotracerbulletx

A 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.

8 hours agogalleywest200

"They wondered how it worked" is different than "they wondered how it produced nicotine", what with "nicotine" being the name of the molecule.

7 hours agofuryofantares

[flagged]

7 hours agosomeguyiguess

>Nicotine was originally isolated from the tobacco plant in 1828 by chemists Wilhelm Heinrich Posselt and Karl Ludwig Reimann from Germany, who believed it was a poison.[210][211] Its chemical empirical formula was described by Melsens in 1843,[212] its structure was discovered by Adolf Pinner and Richard Wolffenstein in 1893

30 seconds on Wikipedia would have given you context of when the separation of nicotine occurred. Kind of hard to guess how tobacco plants make nicotine when you don't know what it is.

7 hours agopixl97

Seems like we're confusing "what" with "how".