FLICKR, MORGAN
Nicotine is poisonous to most animals, but not to the tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta). Now, researchers have shown that cytochrome P450 6B46 (CYP6B46)—a hornworm gene that helps metabolize nicotine—sends a small percentage of the nicotine consumed to the larva’s hemolymph, from which it is released into the air around the caterpillar and deters some predators in a kind of “toxic halitosis.” Their work was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week (December 30).
“It’s really a story about how an insect that eats a plant co-opts the plant for its own defense,” coauthor Ian Baldwin of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany told Live Science.
Baldwin’s team previously showed that predators were more likely to feed on hornworm ...
