According to Science, Humans Can Become Toxic in the Future – Teach Me About Science

Can humans get poisoned? It is unlikely that people would join a certain type of reptile and arthropod among the most poisonous animals, but Research reveals that humans have the tools to produce poison.

To produce the toxin, the expression of certain types of genes is required. This set of genes related to the human salivary glands explains how venom evolved independently from non-venomous ancestors more than 100 times in the animal kingdom. “We basically have all the building blocks for making poison,” said study co-author Agneesh Barua, a doctoral student in evolutionary genetics at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan.

The researchers found a large amount of genes common in multiple tissues of each amnion (the amnion are vertebrates where in the embryonic stage they develop four coverings: the placenta, allantum, amnion and yolk sac, and create an aquatic medium in which they can breathe. Which they can feed on; they include reptiles, birds and some mammals).

Many of these genes are involved in protein folding, because poisonous animals must make a large number of toxins, the biochemical nature of which is protein or peptide. These same types of regulatory genes are found abundantly in human salivary glands. This genetic basis is what allows a wide variety of toxins to evolve independently in the animal kingdom.

Oral poison is common throughout the animal kingdom. Biologists have long recognized that the oral venom-producing glands are modified salivary glands. Now, this research is revealing the molecular basis behind the change. “He’s going to be a real teacher in this field of knowledge,” said Brian Fry, a biochemist at the University of Queensland, who was not involved in the research.

Every mammal or reptile has built the molecular tools with which the oral venom system is built. In this regard, humans also produce a key protein that is used in many toxic systems. Kallikreins, which are secreted in saliva, are other protein-digesting proteins (they are protease-type protein structures) and are also an essential part of many toxins. Therefore, kallikreins are theoretically poisonous from a natural point of view for humans.

In wild species, the toxin plays an important role in reproduction, development and nutrition. However, within the evolutionary process, humans learned to use other tools for such purposes, leaving aside the fact that poison was a vital aspect of their lives, and because large amounts of energy are required to manufacture poison, it is easily lost when unused. This may explain the fact that humans at some point lost the potential ability to produce a venom similar to that found in many other species.

Agneesh Barua, a doctoral student at this institute and author of the study, argues that humans have all the essential components in place that at some point in evolution produce our own toxins, although of course this is not as powerful as a particular poison. So, this research may not raise hopes of seeing humans with toxic superpowers. However, understanding the genes behind the venom could be a key to the future of medicine.

The research was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.