Genetically engineering tobacco plants could enable a more sustainable production method for psychedelic drugs, which are increasingly in demand for research and medical uses
I grew up on a tobacco farm, hardly any aspect is mechanized.
To harvest it:
Put a six foot stick in the ground
Put a metal spear tip on top.
Cut plant with hatchet
Impale on stick
After like 6-8 plants, start a new stick.
Then after a couple weeks load it on a wagon by hand, then hang it in a tobacco barn (aka death trap) where you’re a couple stories high doing the splits, and people pass the sticks up to you and you hang and spread them to dry.
Months later you climb back up and bring it all down.
Then manually remove each and every single leaf.
Grade it.
And compress it into bales using hydraulic jacks.
For tomatoes:
Drive a tractor over the field
Dump tomatoes
Like…
I’m just saying if we need a lot, this is t the means for production. If it’s just testing and it’ll end up somewhere else, no worries.
Lol. They aren’t currently doing it for large scale production.
They also claim that while they could do it, they haven’t modified the plants to make it where their seeds will produce the drugs. Only the current modified plant.
They also said the could just as easily do this to tomato, corn, or potato.
Yes, this is basic research, which generally starts with common model organisms that many labs have access to. This increases reproducibility of the early results. The study mentions expression of the relevant genes and proteins in the buds as well, and also calls out one of the pathways in tomato, so perhaps the next step could be to test it in other nightshades and their fruit
Tobacco industry funded a huge amount of molecular biology in transgenic tobacco and it ended up being a well understood plant model system to express anything.
So the “sticks” that the tobacco goes on are like 5-6 feet long.
Each “bay” needs to be just wide enough for the stick to hang. When “up in a bay” you’re standing on the same thing the sticks hang on, so doing the splits for hours on end while doing manual labor.
Depending on barn, usually at least one person needs to be up in a “bay”. In my family barn we had one person on the ground, one standing on the second “bay” and then someone else a couple rows up above the floor. Like 2-3 real stories if we were talking a house. Because the “top” touched the less weight, that’s where the kids started lol.
Sometimes your lucky and the bays are made of cut wood, often it’s just a straight up fucking locust tree trunk, that’s not even tied down so it rolls side to side a little
The length of a bay varies, but when there’s not a lot on there, it moves/bounces. When you get far enough down the bay that it stops, it starts to sag and creak from the weight. Again, this whole time you’re doing the splits 10-30 feet off the floor of the barn.
It’s so hard to get down/up, you start taking water breaks in the top of the barn.
Where it’s hot as fuck and the air is full of dirt and tobacco dust, but at least you can sit on a beam for two minutes after constantly doing the splits.
Hell of a workout, just not as easy as driving a harvester thru a tomatoe field.
Quick edit:
But it’s not just scary. I saw an uncle have a “bay” break, and he fell maybe 20 feet with shit ton of tobacco and pointy sticks, and his leg went thru the floor of the barn, but he didn’t fall all the way thru.
He was fine, but all that weight and all those pointing sticks, at any moment something can give from the weight, and consequences could be fatal.
Hey maybe I’m being as thick as a tobacco leaf but I’ve been thinking about this and I don’t understand why the sticks the plants are being impaled on can’t be horizontal and spanning a 30 feet long barn? I remembered the ones I visited in Cuba were 10 feet high tops - that being said maybe they were a tourist version, who knows.
Edit: OK guessing you mean something like this:
Totally different scale and kind of operation from what I visited. They made us visit the cute ones I’m guessing.
Yeah, the picture in the comment is still small scale, but illustrated what I’m talking about.
So the bottom row, a guy standing on the ground does.
That second row, would have a guy standing on it. He do his feet, the row chest height, and then usually one more row above. Then another guy on top of that is as high as we’d go. So the higher up you are, the less you have to lift, but the scarier it gets.
I remembered the ones I visited in Cuba were 10 feet high tops
My uncle that fell out of a barn started using crazy long rows one high, and then he’d put tarps over it so it doesn’t get rained on.
It’s just takes up an insane amount of space, and the curing (drying process) isn’t as easily controlled, the plants on the end will all be lower grade. It’s sold via auction, so pennies a pound adds up.
In a barn there’s going to be narrow doors on the side that go up the whole length of the barn, every 10-20 feet.
Depending on conditions you open/close the doors to slow/speed the process. The better it goes the more you make when you sell.
Same principle as why you keep cigars in a humidor
They used an Australian wild tobacco that is widely used in genetic research, so not the American domesticated tobacco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotiana_benthamiana
Still tho…
It’s the same process to harvest leaves.
I grew up on a tobacco farm, hardly any aspect is mechanized.
To harvest it:
Put a six foot stick in the ground
Put a metal spear tip on top.
Cut plant with hatchet
Impale on stick
After like 6-8 plants, start a new stick.
Then after a couple weeks load it on a wagon by hand, then hang it in a tobacco barn (aka death trap) where you’re a couple stories high doing the splits, and people pass the sticks up to you and you hang and spread them to dry.
Months later you climb back up and bring it all down.
Then manually remove each and every single leaf.
Grade it.
And compress it into bales using hydraulic jacks.
For tomatoes:
Drive a tractor over the field
Dump tomatoes
Like…
I’m just saying if we need a lot, this is t the means for production. If it’s just testing and it’ll end up somewhere else, no worries.
Lol. They aren’t currently doing it for large scale production.
They also claim that while they could do it, they haven’t modified the plants to make it where their seeds will produce the drugs. Only the current modified plant.
They also said the could just as easily do this to tomato, corn, or potato.
Tobacco is special in some regards though. They use it for other stuff, like injecting dna into viruses or some weird science shit. I forget.
I appreciate when people have RL experience in a niche topic. Best part of online discussions, thank you for the insight!
Yes, this is basic research, which generally starts with common model organisms that many labs have access to. This increases reproducibility of the early results. The study mentions expression of the relevant genes and proteins in the buds as well, and also calls out one of the pathways in tomato, so perhaps the next step could be to test it in other nightshades and their fruit
Yeah, was just surprised tobacco is a common base for experiments.
And that explains why it’s used here, it’s never going to be at scale
Tobacco industry funded a huge amount of molecular biology in transgenic tobacco and it ended up being a well understood plant model system to express anything.
I’m curious, what makes a tobacco barn a death trap? Is it simply the flammability or is there something else?
(Btw I visited such barns in Cuba and it was the best smell I smelled in my life)
So the “sticks” that the tobacco goes on are like 5-6 feet long.
Each “bay” needs to be just wide enough for the stick to hang. When “up in a bay” you’re standing on the same thing the sticks hang on, so doing the splits for hours on end while doing manual labor.
Depending on barn, usually at least one person needs to be up in a “bay”. In my family barn we had one person on the ground, one standing on the second “bay” and then someone else a couple rows up above the floor. Like 2-3 real stories if we were talking a house. Because the “top” touched the less weight, that’s where the kids started lol.
Sometimes your lucky and the bays are made of cut wood, often it’s just a straight up fucking locust tree trunk, that’s not even tied down so it rolls side to side a little
The length of a bay varies, but when there’s not a lot on there, it moves/bounces. When you get far enough down the bay that it stops, it starts to sag and creak from the weight. Again, this whole time you’re doing the splits 10-30 feet off the floor of the barn.
It’s so hard to get down/up, you start taking water breaks in the top of the barn.
Where it’s hot as fuck and the air is full of dirt and tobacco dust, but at least you can sit on a beam for two minutes after constantly doing the splits.
Hell of a workout, just not as easy as driving a harvester thru a tomatoe field.
Quick edit:
But it’s not just scary. I saw an uncle have a “bay” break, and he fell maybe 20 feet with shit ton of tobacco and pointy sticks, and his leg went thru the floor of the barn, but he didn’t fall all the way thru.
He was fine, but all that weight and all those pointing sticks, at any moment something can give from the weight, and consequences could be fatal.
Hey maybe I’m being as thick as a tobacco leaf but I’ve been thinking about this and I don’t understand why the sticks the plants are being impaled on can’t be horizontal and spanning a 30 feet long barn? I remembered the ones I visited in Cuba were 10 feet high tops - that being said maybe they were a tourist version, who knows.
Edit: OK guessing you mean something like this:
Totally different scale and kind of operation from what I visited. They made us visit the cute ones I’m guessing.
Yeah, the picture in the comment is still small scale, but illustrated what I’m talking about.
So the bottom row, a guy standing on the ground does.
That second row, would have a guy standing on it. He do his feet, the row chest height, and then usually one more row above. Then another guy on top of that is as high as we’d go. So the higher up you are, the less you have to lift, but the scarier it gets.
My uncle that fell out of a barn started using crazy long rows one high, and then he’d put tarps over it so it doesn’t get rained on.
It’s just takes up an insane amount of space, and the curing (drying process) isn’t as easily controlled, the plants on the end will all be lower grade. It’s sold via auction, so pennies a pound adds up.
In a barn there’s going to be narrow doors on the side that go up the whole length of the barn, every 10-20 feet.
Depending on conditions you open/close the doors to slow/speed the process. The better it goes the more you make when you sell.
Same principle as why you keep cigars in a humidor
Interesting, thanks.