This is scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Christine Herman.

Tobacco plants, of course, are grown to make cigarettes, but tobacco is also used a lot in scientific research.

And a new study shows tobacco can be genetically engineered to churn out large amounts of a commercially

important bacterial enzyme known as cellulase.

The enzyme has many industrial uses, including as an agent

in the production of biofuel. And even while their plant machinery is being co-opted

as an enzyme-making factory, the plants suffer no reduction in yield

while grown out in the field compared with unaltered plants. That fact is

rather remarkable because you might suspect that when a plant is expending resources to create large amounts of

cellulase it would struggle to grow. But that's not the case here. The proof of concept study is in the journal

Nature Plants.

University of Illinois Plant Biologist Justin McGrath is a co-lead author of the study.

He says the work could lead to lower costs for producing useful proteins like enzymes and some vaccines.

That's because it can be way cheaper to cultivate tobacco plants in a field

than to grow genetically modified yeast and other microbes indoors in large fermenters.

Here's McGrath.

Our estimates from this study are that it would cost between 20 cents and $1.1 to

produce a gram of the cellulase.

Whereas current methods, depending on the type of method

you're using, could cost from a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand dollars.

Growing such plants in the field rather than indoors also makes it much easier to pursue really large-scale

production of medicinal and industrial proteins. But any time you talk about growing genetically

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