Researchers at the TU Dortmund have succeeded in creating a gene-edited tobacco plant with CRISPR technique that has the lowest nicotine level of all time, New Scientist reported.
According to the report, the gene-edited version has just 0.04 milligrams of nicotine per gram instead of 16 milligrams – a reduction of 99.75 per cent. "It was possible to create the first tobacco plant with no nicotine and other alkaloids with all BBL-genes knocked out and without foreign DNA,” the study said.
Julia Schachtsiek, Oliver Kayser and Felix Stehle from the Department of Biochemical and Chemical Engineering at TU Dortmund University used CRISPR to disable six enzymes involved in the production of nicotine in the tobacco plant. According to livescience, CRISPR (“clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”) technology is “a simple yet powerful tool for editing genomes. It allows researchers to easily alter DNA sequences and modify gene function”.
The creation could increase efforts to reduce nicotine in cigarettes to non-addictive levels, as the US plans to do, the report said. According to the WHO, low-nicotine cigarettes could reduce the risk of people becoming addicted and help them give up but are still dangerous like normal ones.