Tobacco leaves have been proven to be useful time and time again, the latest being used to produce cocaine.
Researchers from China’s Kunming Institute of Botany have uncovered the last major steps of the biosynthetic process to make cocaine. Not only did they basically map the biochemical pathway of cocaine’s production, but the researchers also reconstructed the entire chain inside a humble tobacco plant for good measure.
The process of forcing tobacco to churn out cocaine is unlikely to ever improve on current methods of production, nor provide any serious advances on new ways to spin out stimulants.
But a similar method involving bacteria or yeast could one day revolutionize the way we design and industrialize pharmaceuticals, allowing researchers to tweak the formula and potentially uncover new bioactive compounds with far more efficiency.
The history of cocaine is a longer one, from chewing coca leaves for an energy boost since ancient times to using it as a topical anesthetic in modern surgery to its psychoactive effects in the form of an illicit recreational drug.
Chemically speaking, cocaine has a lot in common with hyoscyamine, with a recent discovery that both emerge from the same precursor – a molecule called 4-(1-methyl-2-pyrrolidinyl)-3-oxobutanoic acid (or MPOA for short). The structural difference between the two molecules is subtle but critical, though.
There remain a few small holes in the map, though researchers are confident enzymes well known to biochemistry could easily do the job.
Derivatives of cocaine, such as cocaine hydrochloride, have been approved for use by the FDA as local anesthetics as recently as 2020, demonstrating this age-old stimulant is far from a relic of history.
This research was published in Journal of the American Chemical Society.