Science / Medicine : Making Tobacco Resistant

Scientists have made some tobacco plants resist a major pest by making them churn out a substance that poisons the insect, researchers report. Through genetic engineering, the researchers gave those plants a gene from a plant called the cowpea, which let the tobacco plants resist the tobacco budworm, they said.

Tobacco plants that got the gene in the laboratory passed it on to their offspring, the researchers report in the British journal Nature. The cowpea gene let the tobacco plants manufacture a substance called trypsin inhibitor, which acts against a variety of insects.