Growing low-nicotine tobacco could help people stop smoking Description:zakir hossain chowdhury/Barcroft Media via Getty
A gene-edited tobacco plant聽created using the CRISPR technique has the lowest ever amount of nicotine. It could boost聽efforts to reduce nicotine in聽cigarettes to non-addictive levels, as the US plans to do.
Felix Stehle and Julia Schachtsiek at the Technical University of Dortmund in Germany used CRISPR to disable聽six enzymes involved in聽the production of nicotine in聽the tobacco plant. They started with a聽strain that usually contains 16 milligrams of nicotine per gram of dry tobacco, but their gene-edited version has just 0.04 milligrams…
