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Audio map of 24 emotions

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Caption: Audio map of vocal bursts across 24 emotions. To visit the online map and hear the sounds, go to https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vocs/map.html# and move the cursor across the map. Credit: Courtesy of Alan Cowen

The real map, not the the image of the map you see above, offers a disconcerting (for me, anyway) experience. Especially since I’ve just finished reading Lisa Feldman Barrett’s 2017 book, How Emotions are Made, where she presents her theory of ‘constructed emotion. (There’s more about ‘constructed emotion’ later in this post.)

Moving on to the story about the ‘auditory emotion map’ in the headline, a February 4, 2019 University of California at Berkeley news release by Yasmin Anwar (also on EurekAlert but published on Feb. 5, 2019) describes the work,

Ooh, surprise! Those spontaneous sounds we make to express everything from elation (woohoo) to embarrassment (oops) say a lot more about what we’re feeling than previously understood, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley.

Proving that a sigh is not just a sigh [a reference to the song, As Time Goes By? The lyric is “a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh …”], UC Berkeley scientists conducted a statistical analysis of listener responses to more than 2,000 nonverbal exclamations known as “vocal bursts” and found they convey at least 24 kinds of emotion. Previous studies of vocal bursts set the number of recognizable emotions closer to 13.

The results, recently published online in the American Psychologist journal, are demonstrated in vivid sound and color on the first-ever interactive audio map of nonverbal vocal communication.

“This study is the most extensive demonstration of our rich emotional vocal repertoire, involving brief signals of upwards of two dozen emotions as intriguing as awe, adoration, interest, sympathy and embarrassment,” said study senior author Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, which helped support the research.

For millions of years, humans have used wordless vocalizations to communicate feelings that can be decoded in a matter of seconds, as this latest study demonstrates.

“Our findings show that the voice is a much more powerful tool for expressing emotion than previously assumed,” said study lead author Alan Cowen, a Ph.D. student in psychology at UC Berkeley.

On Cowen’s audio map, one can slide one’s cursor across the emotional topography and hover over fear (scream), then surprise (gasp), then awe (woah), realization (ohhh), interest (ah?) and finally confusion (huh?).

Among other applications, the map can be used to help teach voice-controlled digital assistants and other robotic devices to better recognize human emotions based on the sounds we make, he said.

As for clinical uses, the map could theoretically guide medical professionals and researchers working with people with dementia, autism and other emotional processing disorders to zero in on specific emotion-related deficits.

“It lays out the different vocal emotions that someone with a disorder might have difficulty understanding,” Cowen said. “For example, you might want to sample the sounds to see if the patient is recognizing nuanced differences between, say, awe and confusion.”

Though limited to U.S. responses, the study suggests humans are so keenly attuned to nonverbal signals – such as the bonding “coos” between parents and infants – that we can pick up on the subtle differences between surprise and alarm, or an amused laugh versus an embarrassed laugh.

For example, by placing the cursor in the embarrassment region of the map, you might find a vocalization that is recognized as a mix of amusement, embarrassment and positive surprise.

A tour through amusement reveals the rich vocabulary of laughter and a spin through the sounds of adoration, sympathy, ecstasy and desire may tell you more about romantic life than you might expect,” said Keltner.

Researchers recorded more than 2,000 vocal bursts from 56 male and female professional actors and non-actors from the United States, India, Kenya and Singapore by asking them to respond to emotionally evocative scenarios.

Next, more than 1,000 adults recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk online marketplace listened to the vocal bursts and evaluated them based on the emotions and meaning they conveyed and whether the tone was positive or negative, among several other characteristics.

A statistical analysis of their responses found that the vocal bursts fit into at least two dozen distinct categories including amusement, anger, awe, confusion, contempt, contentment, desire, disappointment, disgust, distress, ecstasy, elation, embarrassment, fear, interest, pain, realization, relief, sadness, surprise (positive) surprise (negative), sympathy and triumph.

For the second part of the study, researchers sought to present real-world contexts for the vocal bursts. They did this by sampling YouTube video clips that would evoke the 24 emotions established in the first part of the study, such as babies falling, puppies being hugged and spellbinding magic tricks.

This time, 88 adults of all ages judged the vocal bursts extracted from YouTube videos. Again, the researchers were able to categorize their responses into 24 shades of emotion. The full set of data were then organized into a semantic space onto an interactive map.

“These results show that emotional expressions color our social interactions with spirited declarations of our inner feelings that are difficult to fake, and that our friends, co-workers, and loved ones rely on to decipher our true commitments,” Cowen said.

The writer assumes that emotions are pre-existing. Somewhere, there’s happiness, sadness, anger, etc. It’s the pre-existence that Lisa Feldman Barret challenges with her theory that we construct our emotions (from her Wikipedia entry),

She highlights differences in emotions between different cultures, and says that emotions “are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that environment.”

You can find Barrett’s December 6, 2017 TED talk here wheres she explains her theory in greater detail. One final note about Barrett, she was born and educated in Canada and now works as a Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts; US.

A February 7, 2019 by Mark Wilson for Fast Company delves further into the 24 emotion audio map mentioned at the outset of this posting (Note: Links have been removed),

Fear, surprise, awe. Desire, ecstasy, relief.

These emotions are not distinct, but interconnected, across the gradient of human experience. At least that’s what a new paper from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Washington University, and Stockholm University proposes. The accompanying interactive map, which charts the sounds we make and how we feel about them, will likely persuade you to agree.

At the end of his article, Wilson also mentions the Dalai Lama and his Atlas of Emotions, a data visualization project, (featured in Mark Wilson’s May 13, 2016 article for Fast Company). It seems humans of all stripes are interested in emotions.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper about the audio map,

Mapping 24 emotions conveyed by brief human vocalization by Cowen, Alan S;, Elfenbein, Hillary Ange;, Laukka, Petri; Keltner, Dacher. American Psychologist, Dec 20, 2018, No Pagination Specified DOI: 10.1037/amp0000399


This paper is behind a paywall.

Can the future influence the past? The answer is: mostly yes

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The principles of quantum mechanics mystify me which, as it turns out, is the perfect place to start with the work featured in a Feb. 9, 2015 news item on ScienceDaily,

We’re so used to murder mysteries that we don’t even notice how mystery authors play with time. Typically the murder occurs well before the midpoint of the book, but there is an information blackout at that point and the reader learns what happened then only on the last page.

If the last page were ripped out of the book, physicist Kater Murch, PhD, said, would the reader be better off guessing what happened by reading only up to the fatal incident or by reading the entire book?

The answer, so obvious in the case of the murder mystery, is less so in world of quantum mechanics, where indeterminacy is fundamental rather than contrived for our reading pleasure.

A Feb. 13, 2015 Washington University at St. Louis (WUSTL) news release by Diana Lutz, which originated the news item, describes the research,

Even if you know everything quantum mechanics can tell you about a quantum particle, said Murch, an assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, you cannot predict with certainty the outcome of a simple experiment to measure its state. All quantum mechanics can offer are statistical probabilities for the possible results.

The orthodox view is that this indeterminacy is not a defect of the theory, but rather a fact of nature. The particle’s state is not merely unknown, but truly undefined before it is measured. The act of measurement itself that forces the particle to collapse to a definite state.

…

It’s as if what we did today, changed what we did yesterday. And as this analogy suggests, the experimental results have spooky implications for  time and causality—at least in microscopic world to which quantum mechanics applies.

…

Until recently physicists could explore the quantum mechanical properties of single particles only through thought experiments, because any attempt to observe them directly caused them to shed their mysterious quantum properties.

But in the 1980s and 1990s physicists invented devices that allowed them to measure these fragile quantum systems so gently that they don’t immediately collapse to a definite state.

The device Murch uses to explore quantum space is a simple superconducting circuit that enters quantum space when it is cooled to near absolute zero. Murch’s team uses the bottom two energy levels of this qubit, the ground state and an excited state, as their model quantum system. Between these two states, there are an infinite number of quantum states that are superpositions, or combinations, of the ground and excited states.

The quantum state of the circuit is detected by putting it inside a microwave box. A few microwave photons are sent into the box, where their quantum fields interact with the superconducting circuit. So when the photons exit the box they bear information about the quantum system.

Crucially, these “weak,” off-resonance measurements do not disturb the qubit, unlike “strong” measurements with photons that are resonant with the energy difference between the two states, which knock the circuit into one or the other state.

…

In Physical Review Letters, Murch describes a quantum guessing game played with the qubit.

“We start each run by putting the qubit in a superposition of the two states,” he said. “Then we do a strong measurement but hide the result, continuing to follow the system with weak measurements.”

They then try to guess the hidden result, which is their version of the missing page of the murder mystery.

“Calculating forward, using the Born equation that expresses the probability of finding the system in a particular state, your odds of guessing right are only 50-50,” Murch said. “But you can also calculate backward using something called an effect matrix. Just take all the equations and flip them around. They still work and you can just run the trajectory backward.

“So there’s a backward-going trajectory and a forward-going trajectory and if we look at them both together and weight the information in both equally, we get something we call a hindsight prediction, or “retrodiction.”

The shattering thing about the retrodiction is that it is 90 percent accurate. When the physicists check it against the stored measurement of the system’s earlier state it is right nine times out of 10.

Going from a 50% accuracy rate to 90% is quite amazing and according to the news release, this has many implications,

The quantum guessing game suggests ways to make both quantum computing and the quantum control of open systems, such as chemical reactions, more robust. But it also has implications for much deeper problems in physics.

For one thing, it suggests that in the quantum world time runs both backward and forward whereas in the classical world it only runs forward.

“I always thought the measurement would resolve the time symmetry in quantum mechanics,” Murch said. “If we measure a particle in a superposition of states and it collapses into one of two states, well, that sounds like a process that goes forward in time.”

But in the quantum guessing experiment, time symmetry has returned. The improved odds imply the measured quantum state somehow incorporates information from the future as well as the past. And that implies that time, notoriously an arrow in the classical world, is a double-headed arrow in the quantum world.

“It’s not clear why in the real world, the world made up of many particles, time only goes forward and entropy always increases,” Murch said. “But many people are working on that problem and I expect it will be solved in a few years,” he said.

In a world where time is symmetric, however, is there such a thing as cause and effect? To find out, Murch proposes to run a qubit experiment that would set up feedback loops (which are chains of cause and effect) and try to run them both forward and backward.

“It takes 20 or 30 minutes to run one of these experiments,” Murch said, “several weeks to process it, and a year to scratch our heads to see if we’re crazy or not.”

“At the end of the day,” he said, “I take solace in the fact that we have a real experiment and real data that we plot on real curves.”

Here are links to and citations for the Physical Review paper and an earlier version of the paper,

 Prediction and retrodiction for a continuously monitored superconducting qubit by D. Tan, S. Weber, I. Siddiqi, K. Mølmer, K. W. Murch. arXiv.org > quant-ph > arXiv:1409.0510 (Submitted on 1 Sep 2014 (v1), last revised 10 Nov 2014 (this version, v2))

I last mentioned Kater Murch and his work in a July 31, 2014 post titled: Paths of desire: quantum style.

Paths of desire: quantum style

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Shortcuts are also called paths of desire (and other terms too) by those who loathe them. It turns that humans and other animals are not the only ones who use shortcuts. From a July 30, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily,

Groundskeepers and landscapers hate them, but there is no fighting them. Called desire paths, social trails or goat tracks, they are the unofficial shortcuts people create between two locations when the purpose-built path doesn’t take them where they want to go.

There’s a similar concept in classical physics called the “path of least action.” If you throw a softball to a friend, the ball traces a parabola through space. It doesn’t follow a serpentine path or loop the loop because those paths have higher “actions” than the true path.

A July 30, 2014 Washington University in St. Louis (Missouri, US) news release (also on EurekAlert) by Diana Lutz, which originated the news item, describes the issues associated with undertaking this research,

Quantum particles can exist in a superposition of states, yet as soon as quantum particles are “touched” by the outside world, they lose this quantum strangeness and collapse to a classically permitted state. Because of this evasiveness, it wasn’t possible until recently to observe them in their quantum state.

But in the past 20 years, physicists have devised devices that isolate quantum systems from the environment and allow them to be probed so gently that they don’t immediately collapse. With these devices, scientists can at long last follow quantum systems into quantum territory, or state space.

Kater Murch, PhD, an assistant professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis, and collaborators Steven Weber and Irfan Siddiqui of the Quantum Nanoelectronics Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, have used a superconducting quantum device to continuously record the tremulous paths a quantum system took between a superposition of states to one of two classically permitted states.

Because even gentle probing makes each quantum trajectory noisy, Murch’s team repeated the experiment a million times and examined which paths were most common. The quantum equivalent of the classical “least action” path — or the quantum device’s path of desire — emerged from the resulting cobweb of many paths, just as pedestrian desire paths gradually emerge after new sod is laid.

The experiments, the first continuous measurements of the trajectories of a quantum system between two points, are described in the cover article of the July 31 [2014] issue of Nature.

“We are working with the simplest possible quantum system,” Murch said. “But the understanding of quantum interactions we are gaining might eventually be useful for the quantum control of biological and chemical systems.

“Chemistry at its most basic level is described by quantum mechanics,” he said. “In the past 20 years, chemists have developed a technique called quantum control, where shaped laser pulses are used to drive chemical reactions — that is, to drive them between two quantum states. The chemists control the quantum field from the laser, and that field controls the dynamics of a reaction,” he said.

“Eventually, we’ll be able to control the dynamics of chemical reactions with lasers instead of just mixing reactant 1 with reactant 2 and letting the reaction evolve on its own,” he said.

An artificial atom The device Murch uses to explore quantum space is a simple superconducting circuit. Because it has quantized energy levels, or states, like an atom, it is sometimes called an artificial atom. Murch’s team uses the bottom two energy levels, the ground state and an excited state, as their model quantum system.

Between these two states, there are an infinite number of quantum states that are superpositions, or combinations, of the ground and excited states. In the past, these states would have been invisible to physicists because attempts to measure them would have caused the system to immediately collapse.

But Murch’s device allows the system’s state to be probed many times before it becomes an effectively classical system. The quantum state of the circuit is detected by putting it inside a microwave box. A very small number of microwave photons are sent into the box where their quantum fields interact with the superconducting circuit.

The microwaves are so far off resonance with the circuit that they cannot drive it between its ground and its excited state. So instead of being absorbed, they leave the box bearing information about the quantum system in the form of a phase shift (the position of the troughs and peaks of the photons’ wavefunctions).

Although there is information about the quantum system in the exiting microwaves, it is only a small amount of information.

“Every time we nudge the system, something different happens,” Murch said. “That’s because the photons we use to measure the quantum system are quantum mechanical as well and exhibit quantum fluctuations. So it takes many of these measurements to distinguish the system’s signal from the quantum fluctuations of the photons probing it.” Or, as physicists put it, these are weak measurements.

Murch compares these experiments to soccer matches, which are ultimately experiments to determine which team is better. But because so few goals are scored in soccer, and these are often lucky shots, the less skilled team has a good chance of winning. Or as Murch might put it, one soccer match is such a weak measurement of a team’s skill that it can’t be used to draw a statistically reliable conclusion about which team is more skilled.

Each time a team scores a goal, it becomes somewhat more likely that that team is the better team, but the teams would have to play many games or play for a very long time to know for sure. These fluctuations are what make soccer matches so exciting.

Murch is in essence able to observe millions of these matches, and from all the matches where team B wins, he can determine the most likely way a game that ends with a victory for team B will develop.

Despite the difficulties, the team did establish a path of desire,

“Before we started this experiment,” Murch said, ” I asked everybody in the lab what they thought the most likely path between quantum states would be. I drew a couple of options on the board: a straight line, a convex curve, a concave curve, a squiggly line . . . I took a poll, and we all guessed different options. Here we were, a bunch of quantum experts, and we had absolutely no intuition about the most likely path.”

Andrew N. Jordan of the University of Rochester and his students Areeya Chantasri and Justin Dressel inspired the study by devising a theory to predict the likely path. Their theory predicted that a convex curve Murch had drawn on the white board would be the correct path.

“When we looked at the data, we saw that the theorists were right. Our very clever collaborators had devised a ‘principle of least action’ that works in the quantum case,” Murch said.

They had found the quantum system’s line of desire mathematically and by calculation before many microwave photons trampled out the path in Murch’s lab.

Here’s an illustrated quantum path of desire’s experimental data,

Caption: A path of desire emerging from many trajectories between two points in quantum state space. Credit: Murch Lab/WUSTL

Caption: A path of desire emerging from many trajectories between two points in quantum state space.
Credit: Murch Lab/WUSTL

The University of Rochester, a collaborating institution on this research, issued a July 30, 2014 news release (also on EurekAlert) featuring this poetic allusion from one of the theorists,

Jordan [Andrew N. Jordan, professor of physics at the University of Rochester] compares the experiment to watching butterflies make their way one by one from a cage to nearby trees. “Each butterfly’s path is like a single run of the experiment,” said Jordan. “They are all starting from the same cage, the initial state, and ending in one of the trees, each being a different end state.” By watching the quantum equivalent of a million butterflies make the journey from cage to tree, the researchers were in effect able to predict the most likely path a butterfly took by observing which tree it landed on (known as post-selection in quantum physics measurements), despite the presence of a wind, or any disturbance that affects how it flies (which is similar to the effect measuring has on the system).

The theorists provided this illustration of the theory,

Caption: Measurement data showing the comparison with the 'most likely' path (in red) between initial and final quantum states (black dots). The measurements are shown on a representation referred to as a Bloch sphere. Credit: Areeya Chantasri Courtesy: University of Rochester

Caption: Measurement data showing the comparison with the ‘most likely’ path (in red) between initial and final quantum states (black dots). The measurements are shown on a representation referred to as a Bloch sphere.
Credit: Areeya Chantasri Courtesy: University of Rochester

The research study can be found here,

Mapping the optimal route between two quantum states by S. J. Weber, A. Chantasri, J. Dressel, A. N. Jordan, K. W. Murch & I. Siddiqi. Nature 511, 570–573 (31 July 2014) doi:10.1038/nature13559 Published online 30 July 2014

This paper is behind a paywall but there is a free preview via ReadCube Access.

Solar cells and copper sprouts

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First, Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL; located in Missouri, US) announced a discovery about solar cells, then, the university announced a commitment to increase solar output by Fall 2014. Whether these two announcements are linked by some larger policy or strategy is not clear to me but it’s certainly an interesting confluence of events.

An April 26, 2014 news item on Azonano describes the researchers’ discovery,

By looking at a piece of material in cross section, Washington University in St. Louis engineer Parag Banerjee, PhD, and his team discovered how copper sprouts grass-like nanowires that could one day be made into solar cells.

Banerjee, assistant professor of materials science and an expert in working with nanomaterials, Fei Wu, graduate research assistant, and Yoon Myung, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate, also took a step toward making solar cells and more cost-effective.

An April 21, 2014 WUSTL news release by Beth Miller, which originated the news item, describes the research in some detail,

Banerjee and his team worked with copper foil, a simple material similar to household aluminum foil. When most metals are heated, they form a thick metal oxide film. However, a few metals, such as copper, iron and zinc, grow grass-like structures known as nanowires, which are long, cylindrical structures a few hundred nanometers wide by many microns tall. They set out to determine how the nanowires grow.

“Other researchers look at these wires from the top down,” Banerjee says. “We wanted to do something different, so we broke our sample and looked at it from the side view to see if we got different information, and we did.”

…

The team used Raman spectroscopy, a technique that uses light from a laser beam to interact with molecular vibrations or other movements. They found an underlying thick film made up of two different copper oxides (CuO and Cu2O) that had narrow, vertical columns of grains running through them. In between these columns, they found grain boundaries that acted as arteries through which the copper from the underlying layer was being pushed through when heat was applied, creating the nanowires.

“We’re now playing with this ionic transport mechanism, turning it on and off and seeing if we can get some different forms of wires,” says Banerjee, who runs the Laboratory for Emerging and Applied Nanomaterials (L.E.A.N.).

Like solar cells, the nanowires are single crystal in structure, or a continuous piece of material with no grain boundaries, Banerjee says.

“If we could take these and study some of the basic optical and electronic properties, we could potentially make solar cells,” he says. “In terms of optical properties, copper oxides are well-positioned to become a solar energy harvesting material.”

This work may be useful in other applications according to the news release,

The find may also benefit other engineers who want to use single crystal oxides in scientific research. Manufacturing single crystal Cu2O for research is very expensive, Banerjee says, costing up to about $1,500 for one crystal.

“But if you can live with this form that’s a long wire instead of a small crystal, you can really use it to study basic scientific phenomena,” Banerjee says.

Banerjee’s team also is looking for other uses for the nanowires, including acting as a semiconductor between two materials, as a photocatalyst, a photovoltaic or an electrode for splitting water.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Unravelling transient phases during thermal oxidation of copper for dense CuO nanowire growth by Fei Wu, Yoon Myunga and Parag Banerjee.  CrystEngComm, 2014,16, 3264-3267. DOI: 10.1039/C4CE00275J First published online 26 Feb 2014

This article is behind a paywall.

Shortly after the research announcement, WUSTL made this ‘solar’ announcement via an April 29, 2014 news release by Neil Schoenherr,

Washington University in St. Louis is moving forward with a bold and impactful plan to increase solar output on all campuses by 1,150 percent over current levels by this fall. The project demonstrates the university’s commitment to sustainable operations and to reducing its environmental impact in the St. Louis region and beyond.

This spring and early summer, the university will add a total of 379 kilowatts (kw) of solar on university-owned property throughout the region. Prior to this installation, the university had 33 kw that were installed as demonstration projects.

I suspect the two announcements reflect synchronicity or, perhaps, my tendency to see and develop patterns.

Bee venom, HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), and targeted nanoparticles

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Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis (Missouri, US) have found a way to use nanoparticles impregnated with bee venom to hopelessly damage HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) in laboratory tests, according to a Mar. 7, 2013 news release on EurekAlert,

Nanoparticles carrying a toxin found in bee venom can destroy human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) while leaving surrounding cells unharmed, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown. The finding is an important step toward developing a vaginal gel that may prevent the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

“Our hope is that in places where HIV is running rampant, people could use this gel as a preventive measure to stop the initial infection,” says Joshua L. Hood, MD, PhD, a research instructor in medicine.

Nanoparticles (purple) carrying melittin (green) fuse with HIV (small circles with spiked outer ring), destroying the virus’s protective envelope. Molecular bumpers (small red ovals) prevent the nanoparticles from harming the body’s normal cells, which are much larger in size. Credit: Joshua L. Hood, MD, PhD (downloaded from: http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/25061.aspx

Nanoparticles (purple) carrying melittin (green) fuse with HIV (small circles with spiked outer ring), destroying the virus’s protective envelope. Molecular bumpers (small red ovals) prevent the nanoparticles from harming the body’s normal cells, which are much larger in size. Credit: Joshua L. Hood, MD, PhD (downloaded from: http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/25061.aspx

Dexter Johnson in his Mar. 8, 2013 posting on Nanoclast (IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] blog) contextualizes this research with links to other related research along with his comments about this latest work (Note: A link has been removed),

The research, which was published in the journal Antiviral Therapy (“Cytolytic nanoparticles attenuate HIV-1 infectivity”), employed a nanoparticle that had previously been abandoned when it proved ineffective for delivering oxygen to blood cells. But in its new role, carrying the toxin melittin, a poison found in bee venom, it is extremely effective at breaking down the essential structure of HIV.

The Washington University in Saint Louis Mar. 7, 2013 news release (and origin for EurekAlert news release) written by Julia Evangelou Strait provides details about the research,

Bee venom contains a potent toxin called melittin that can poke holes in the protective envelope that surrounds HIV, and other viruses. Large amounts of free melittin can cause a lot of damage. Indeed, in addition to anti-viral therapy, the paper’s senior author, Samuel A. Wickline, MD, the J. Russell Hornsby Professor of Biomedical Sciences, has shown melittin-loaded nanoparticles to be effective in killing tumor cells.

The new study shows that melittin loaded onto these nanoparticles does not harm normal cells. That’s because Hood added protective bumpers to the nanoparticle surface. When the nanoparticles come into contact with normal cells, which are much larger in size, the particles simply bounce off. HIV, on the other hand, is even smaller than the nanoparticle, so HIV fits between the bumpers and makes contact with the surface of the nanoparticle, where the bee toxin awaits.

“Melittin on the nanoparticles fuses with the viral envelope,” Hood says. “The melittin forms little pore-like attack complexes and ruptures the envelope, stripping it off the virus.”

According to Hood, an advantage of this approach is that the nanoparticle attacks an essential part of the virus’ structure. In contrast, most anti-HIV drugs inhibit the virus’s ability to replicate. But this anti-replication strategy does nothing to stop initial infection, and some strains of the virus have found ways around these drugs and reproduce anyway.

“We are attacking an inherent physical property of HIV,” Hood says. “Theoretically, there isn’t any way for the virus to adapt to that. The virus has to have a protective coat, a double-layered membrane that covers the virus.”

Beyond prevention in the form of a vaginal gel, Hood also sees potential for using nanoparticles with melittin as therapy for existing HIV infections, especially those that are drug-resistant. The nanoparticles could be injected intravenously and, in theory, would be able to clear HIV from the blood stream.

…

While this work was done in cells in a laboratory environment, Hood and his colleagues say the nanoparticles are easy to manufacture in large enough quantities to supply them for future clinical trials.

Here’s a citation and link to the paper,

Joshua L Hood, Andrew P Jallouk, Nancy Campbell, Lee Ratner, Samuel A Wickline. Cytolytic nanoparticles attenuate HIV-1 infectivity. Antiviral Therapy. Vol. 19: 95 – 103. 2013

The article is behind a paywall.