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

york.ac.uk

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

#11

Post by furyofantares »

galleywest200 wrote: post #10
tracerbulletx wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

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

#13

Post by someguyiguess »

furyofantares wrote: post #11
galleywest200 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

[flagged]

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

#15

Post by pixl97 »

goodmythical wrote: post #7

[flagged]

>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.

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

#16

Post by jrflowers »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #4

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Acacia_species_known_t...

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

#17

Post by mikeweiss »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #4

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?

Your talking about cocaine right?

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

#18

Post by storus »

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.

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

#20

Post by bitmasher9 »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #4

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?

This isn’t how drug discovery works at all.
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