Scientists from the University of California forced tobacco to produce complex sugars that are found in breast milk. To do this, they took Bentham tobacco (cigarettes are not made from it) and modified its genome. This allowed them to change the mechanism in plants that combines simple sugars into complex ones.
As a result, they managed to obtain 11 human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) from tobacco. In total, there are about 200 types of such compounds in breast milk, so there is still a lot of work to do. But even the 11 HMOs obtained by the researchers belong to all three known groups of such substances. Before this, no organism could produce such a variety. And some sugars could not be synthesized on a significant scale.
About three quarters of babies in the world are fed with infant formula in the first six months of life. Such mixtures are not considered full replacements for breast milk precisely because they do not fully replicate its nutritional properties. If the technology developed by scientists can be developed and scaled up, the industry will come closer to creating infant formulas that are 100% identical to breast milk.