Sorting out stroking sensations ( PASADENA Calif.The skin is a human b...)

Sorting out stroking sensations

Date:1/30/2013

PASADENA, Calif.The skin is a human being's largest sensory organ, helping to distinguish between a pleasant contact, like a caress, and a negative sensation, like a pinch or a burn. Previous studies have shown that these sensations are carried to the brain by different types of sensory neurons that have nerve endings in the skin. Only a few of those neuron types have been identified, however, and most of those detect painful stimuli. Now biologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have identified in mice a specific class of skin sensory neurons that reacts to an apparently pleasurable stimulus.

More specifically, the team, led by David J. Anderson, Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology at Caltech, was able to pinpoint individual neurons that were activated by massage-like stroking of the skin. The team's results are outlined in the January 31 issue of the journal Nature.

"We've known a lot about the neurons that detect things that make us hurt or feel pain, but we've known much less about the identity of the neurons that make us feel good when they are stimulated," says Anderson, who is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "Generally it's a lot easier to study things that are painful because animals have evolved to become much more sensitive to things that hurt or are fearful than to things that feel good. Showing a positive influence of something on an animal model is not that easy."

In fact, the researchers had to develop new methods and technologies to get their results. First, Sophia Vrontou, a postdoctoral fellow in Anderson's lab and the lead author of the study, developed a line of genetically modified mice that had tags, or molecular markers, on the neurons that the team wanted to study. Then she placed a molecule in this specific population of neurons that fluoresced, or lit up, when the neurons were activated.

"The next step was to figure out a way of recording thos
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Contact: Brian Bell
bpbell@caltech.edu
626-395-5832
California Institute of Technology
Source:Eurekalert

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