Entries by Charlay Wood

The last piece of the nicotine puzzle

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No other alkaloid has received as much scientific attention as nicotine. For better or for worse, tobacco has been used by humans for at least 12,000 years, yet the final steps of nicotine biosynthesis have remained stubbornly unresolved until now. A new paper in Cell by Chang et al. (2026) reveals that the key missing […]

Quinine, deconstructed ✅

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For more than two centuries, quinine from Cinchona bark has stood as one of the best-known plant-derived medicines for malaria treatment, but the enzymes that build its distinctive scaffold were unknown. Lombe et al. have now resolved the core logic of cinchona alkaloid biosynthesis in Cinchona pubescens, by combining isotope feeding, virus-induced gene silencing, single-nucleus […]