A long-standing nicotine mystery.

A five-component metabolon was identified as catalyzing the final steps of the nicotine biosynthetic pathway in plants, resolving a long-standing nicotine synthesis mystery.

• Why it matters: The pathway for making nicotine has been hard to pin down for decades, limiting efforts to understand how plants produce this insecticidal compound and to manipulate it.
• What they did: Chang et al. reported a five-component metabolon that catalyzes the terminal reactions in nicotine biosynthesis, using a new mechanistic characterization of the pathway’s last steps.
• The result: The discovery clarifies how plants complete nicotine production and suggests a route for engineering plant resistance by targeting the final-step metabolon.

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