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

Uncovered how tobacco plants naturally make nicotine, solving a mystery that has puzzled researchers for nearly two centuries. The science-journalism coverage adds useful context, while the strongest evidential footing still comes from the underlying data, papers or institutional documentation.

This matters because chemistry gains force when a claimed structure or process can be described with enough precision to be reproduced by others. Synthetic routes, spectroscopic signatures, yield under defined conditions and stability under realistic operating parameters are the currency of credibility in chemistry, and a result that lacks these details cannot be evaluated independently. The distance between a discovery on a laboratory bench and a process that works reliably at scale is measured in years of optimization, and each step reveals constraints that were invisible at smaller scale. The discovery, published in Nature Communications, could lead to safer production of medicines and vaccines using tobacco plants, without the unwanted nicotine. This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies.

Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Add as preferred source The puzzle of how tobacco plants produce nicotine has been. Nicotine, the chemical that makes tobacco products addictive, has been used by humans for over 10, 000 years.

The puzzle of how tobacco plants produce nicotine, however, has been around since the late 1820s, when nicotine was first extracted from the plants. It is a big moment in plant science and biochemistry that we now have the answer we have been chasing for more than 200 years.

Student and first author of the study, also discovered the exact structures of two special plant enzymes, NaGR and NicGS, that help assemble the nicotine molecule from smaller. One comes from a vitamin-like compound, and the other from an amino acid related to protein building.

The broader interest lies in whether the claimed property or reaction pathway can be characterized with enough precision to support replication by other groups. Chemistry has a replication problem that is less discussed than the one in psychology or medicine, but it is real: synthetic procedures that work reliably in one laboratory sometimes fail to transfer, for reasons ranging from impure starting materials to undocumented temperature sensitivities. A result that comes with full experimental detail and a clear characterization of the product is far more valuable than one that reports a discovery without the procedural backbone.

Schwabe et al, Nicotine biosynthesis is completed by cryptic activating glucosylation, Nature Communications (2026). BSc Life Sciences & Ecology.

Because this item comes through Phys. org Chemistry as science journalism, it should be treated as contextual reporting rather than primary evidence. Good science reporting can identify why a result matters, connect it to the wider literature and make technical work readable, but the decisive evidence remains in the original paper, dataset, mission release or technical record. That distinction is especially important when a story is later repeated by aggregators, because repetition increases visibility, not evidential strength.

The next step is to see whether independent groups working with orthogonal techniques reach compatible conclusions, and whether the result scales beyond the conditions used in the original study. Chemical discoveries that matter tend to be ones whose key properties can be measured by multiple spectroscopic, crystallographic or computational methods that are unlikely to share the same blind spots. Scalability, cost and long-term stability under realistic operating conditions are additional filters that come into play before any practical application becomes viable.

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