A new study demonstrates how plants of the nightshade family produce pharmaceutically valuable compounds and how this biosynthesis is epigenetically regulated. Plants are masters at producing a huge variety of chemical substances to protect themselves against animals and pathogens. Among the hundreds of thousands of botanical compounds, many are interesting for human health due to their medicinal characteristics. Many plants of the nightshade family, for example, form so-called withanolides, a diverse group of steroids with health-beneficial properties. However, there has been little research into the biosynthesis and regulation of these compounds.