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Human Saliva Has Potential to Evolve Into Venom

Snakes hang from a wooden cabinet marked with the Chinese characters "poisonous snake", at a snake soup shop ahead of the Spring Festival in Hong Kong. Photo: Reuters
Snakes hang from a wooden cabinet marked with the Chinese characters "poisonous snake", at a snake soup shop ahead of the Spring Festival in Hong Kong. Photo: Reuters
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Human Saliva Has Potential to Evolve Into Venom

Snakes hang from a wooden cabinet marked with the Chinese characters "poisonous snake", at a snake soup shop ahead of the Spring Festival in Hong Kong. Photo: Reuters
Snakes hang from a wooden cabinet marked with the Chinese characters "poisonous snake", at a snake soup shop ahead of the Spring Festival in Hong Kong. Photo: Reuters

Humans have the potential to become venomous due the genetic similarities between our saliva glands and a snake's venom glands, say scientists.

A joint research team from Japan's Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) and the Australian National University, found that the genetic foundation required for oral venom to evolve is present in both reptiles and mammals.

Reporting this in the journal PNAS on April 6, the researchers provided the first concrete evidence of an underlying molecular link between venom glands in snakes and salivary glands in mammals.

Venoms are a cocktail of proteins that animals have weaponized to immobilize and kill prey, as well as for self-defense. What's interesting about venom is that it has arisen in so many different animals: jellyfish, spiders, scorpions, snakes, and even some mammals. Although these animals evolved different ways to deliver venom, an oral system, where venom is injected through a bite is one of the most common.

In the study, the team looked at the genes that played important roles in protecting the cells from stress caused by producing lots of proteins. The genes were also key in regulating protein modification and folding. The scientists used venom glands collected from the Taiwan habu snake, a pit viper found in Asia.

The researchers identified around 3,000 of these 'cooperating' genes. Then, they studied the genomes of other creatures across the animal kingdom, including mammals like dogs, chimpanzees and humans, and found that they contained their own versions of these genes.

When the team looked at the salivary gland tissues within mammals, they found that the genes had a similar pattern of activity to that seen in snake venom glands. The scientists therefore think that salivary glands in mammals and venom glands in snakes share an ancient functional core that has been maintained since the two lineages split hundreds of millions of years ago.

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A Stroke Survivor Speaks Again with the Help of an Experimental Brain-Computer Implant

The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. (Getty Images)
The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. (Getty Images)
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A Stroke Survivor Speaks Again with the Help of an Experimental Brain-Computer Implant

The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. (Getty Images)
The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. (Getty Images)

Scientists have developed a device that can translate thoughts about speech into spoken words in real time.

Although it’s still experimental, they hope the brain-computer interface could someday help give voice to those unable to speak.

A new study described testing the device on a 47-year-old woman with quadriplegia who couldn’t speak for 18 years after a stroke. Doctors implanted it in her brain during surgery as part of a clinical trial.

It "converts her intent to speak into fluent sentences," said Gopala Anumanchipalli, a co-author of the study published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Other brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, for speech typically have a slight delay between thoughts of sentences and computerized verbalization. Such delays can disrupt the natural flow of conversation, potentially leading to miscommunication and frustration, researchers said.

This is "a pretty big advance in our field," said Jonathan Brumberg of the Speech and Applied Neuroscience Lab at the University of Kansas, who was not part of the study.

A team in California recorded the woman’s brain activity using electrodes while she spoke sentences silently in her brain. The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. They trained an AI model that translates neural activity into units of sound.

It works similarly to existing systems used to transcribe meetings or phone calls in real time, said Anumanchipalli, of the University of California, Berkeley.

The implant itself sits on the speech center of the brain so that it’s listening in, and those signals are translated to pieces of speech that make up sentences. It’s a "streaming approach," Anumanchipalli said, with each 80-millisecond chunk of speech – about half a syllable – sent into a recorder.

"It’s not waiting for a sentence to finish," Anumanchipalli said. "It’s processing it on the fly."

Decoding speech that quickly has the potential to keep up with the fast pace of natural speech, said Brumberg. The use of voice samples, he added, "would be a significant advance in the naturalness of speech."

Though the work was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health, Anumanchipalli said it wasn't affected by recent NIH research cuts. More research is needed before the technology is ready for wide use, but with "sustained investments," it could be available to patients within a decade, he said.