Slashdot Mirror
Simpsons Fan Creates Real Tomacco Plant
An anonymous reader writes "So, according to a KPTV newscast, a Simpsons fan with too much time on his hands grafted a tobacco plant and a tomato plant and, ta-da: tomacco! Leaves and most likely the fruit (yes, tomato is a fruit technically) contain nicotine. Delicious AND deadly!" Simpsonschannel.com has a small news piece on the breakthrough, but in a Frink-like move, although scientists have found "nicotine in the leaves", it turns out "the lab hasn't tested if the actual tomato has nicotine in it yet, but they say it probably does."
They are both nightshades.
Tomato plants can get the Tobacco Mosaic virus, too.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
That creationist argument is debunked here (number 15):
"Yet evolutionary biologists have answers to these objections. First, there exist flagellae with forms simpler than the one that Behe cites, so it is not necessary for all those components to be present for a flagellum to work. The sophisticated components of this flagellum all have precedents elsewhere in nature, as described by Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University and others. In fact, the entire flagellum assembly is extremely similar to an organelle that Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague bacterium, uses to inject toxins into cells."
Its common knowledge that tomatos can be grafted on to a wide range of plants in the Solanum family including potatoes, tobacco, Datura, etc. In fact the Russians made a tomacco back in 1956 (See Glavinic, R., 1956 (Vegetative hybridization between tomato and tobacco). Priroda (Nature), Leningrad No. 11: 98-100. (Russian)).
Now if we only had only had slashdot back in 1956.....
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I've seen that in health-nut sites & rags, but as biologists classify things, there is a very large family Solanaceae, which has genus Nicotiana (including those bad Nicotiana Tabacum species), and genus Solanum, which includes over 1400 species including the beloved spud & tomatoes. So really not too closely related.....I suspect many health nuts were dropping too much LSD in the 60's instead of paying attention in biology class.
I can't believe no one mentioned this already (I searched the comments page.)
In a graft, which is what has been done here, you stick the stem of one plant (tomato in this case) onto the root of another (tobacco in this case). If the two plants are closely related (as are tomatoes and tobacco,) the hybrid plant will grow and survive; often, chemicals (nicotine in this case) will move in the sap from the roots to the leaves (and presumably fruit.)
This is NOT a genetic change. If you took these "tomacco" seeds and planted them, they'd grow into regular tomatoes. Making the genetic changes required for tomatoes to actually make their own nicotine (which would breed true,) is an entirely different and more complicated prospect.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Nicotine is actually a poison . Before downplaying the intake of poison I would learn the facts. As for cigarettes and the diseaes they help bring on learn about how they get those little numbers on their packs before thinking you are any less exposed.
Course, you could just prove it all wrong by soaking a pack or two of cigarettes in 32oz of water and chugging it after cutting off your phone service and access to medical help.
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)