Beyond Nicotine: The Untold Benefits of Tobacco

Pipe Tobacco in bagsTobacco is a popular product. Derivatives such as pipe tobacco are even popular luxury products. Yet, the humble Nicotania plant has been blamed for far more than its fair share of problems.

Tobacco is much more than filler for cigarettes. If you buy tobacco online, you may have read that its applications go beyond current knowledge. Along with the producer plant, Nicotania, tobacco represents valuable tools for current and future advancement of different sectors within a country.

In the last ten years alone, tobacco research has engineered significant developments in biotechnology and plant science. Therefore, there is great enlightenment in scientific and agronomic subjects such as plant growth, genetics, plant pathology, nutrition, and plant growth.

However, research with tobacco plants has made immense contributions that surpass the field of agricultural science.

Tobacco is a mainstay in many bio-engineering pharmaceutical labs, as a basis for the production of a vast array of drugs and therapeutic agents. If you've ever heard the term "plant molecular farming," you are super-cool. For the uninformed, plant molecular farming is a fancy term focusing on the use of plants as incubators to produce proteins. These proteins have critical industrial and pharmaceutical applications, using recombinant DNA technologies.

These therapeutic products target conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, cystic fibrosis, cancer, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, cancer, and Ebola. Research is actively going on to expand the exploitation of tobacco as a “biologic incubator” to produce vaccines.

A process that employs tobacco leaves to produce influenza vaccines has the potential to speed up vaccine manufacturing, once it is developed. It will also allow patients to discard strain-specific vaccines within a month.

Nicotania is of particular interest for so-called “green energy.” One particularly ambitious project is aiming to convert tobacco seeds into sustainable materials and energy. Varieties of tobacco may be selected and bred. They may also be genetically modified to enhance the quantity of oil within the seeds. The oil can be turned to and used as biofuel. Did you hear of the tobacco-powered plane that could soon take off from Cape Town and head for Johannesburg in South Africa?

In fact, the South African Airways expects its fleet to be 50 percent powered by tobacco around 2023. That represents the consumption of 500 million liters of biofuel each year. One could write volumes on the positive environmental impact of this move.

As you enjoy your cigarettes, remember that you’re not just enriching that tobacco shop online. There's truly more to your cigarette than just the smoke.


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