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| How nerve cells perceive temperature and touch——Interpretation of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine |
Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, October 4 (Reporter Ying Zhang) Humans’ ability to perceive temperature and touch is vital to survival, and this ability supports humans’ interaction with the world around them
.
How do nerve impulses that can sense temperature and touch come about? The work of David Julius and Adem Pataptian, winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, helped humans understand the mechanism
For a long time, humans have been curious about the mechanism behind perception and have put forward various hypotheses
.
Two scientists, Joseph Erlanger and Herbert Gasser, once discovered that different types of sensory nerve fibers can respond to different stimuli, such as painful and non-painful touch.
However, before the discovery of Julius and Pataptian, there was still a blank area in human understanding of how the nervous system perceives the environment: how temperature and touch are transformed into electrical impulses in the nervous system?
In the late 1990s, David Julius, who worked at the University of California, San Francisco, made significant progress by analyzing how capsaicin makes people feel burning
.
Julius and his colleagues created a gene bank consisting of millions of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) fragments that correspond to genes expressed in sensory neurons that respond to pain, heat, and touch.
After a arduous search, Julius and his colleagues finally discovered a gene that makes cells sensitive to capsaicin
.
The gene encodes a new ion channel protein, and this capsaicin-sensitive protein is named TRPV1
The discovery of TRPV1 enabled people to understand how temperature differences induce electrical signals in the nervous system.
The discovery also led to other research on temperature-sensitive receptors
.
Since then, Julius and Pataptian independently discovered a receptor TRPM8 that can be activated by cold using the chemical menthol
In order to explain how mechanical stimulation turns into touch, Pataptian, who works at the Scripps Research Institute in the United States, hopes to find out which receptors are activated by mechanical stimulation
.
Pataptian and his colleagues first discovered a cell line in which when a single cell is poked by a microtubule, the cell line emits a measurable electrical signal
Pataptian and his colleagues discovered a new type of pressure-sensitive ion channel, which they named Piezo1
.
This word comes from the word "stress" in Greek
The work of Julius and Pataptian also helps to understand many other physiological functions related to the perception of temperature or mechanical stimuli
.
For example, Piezo1 and Piezo2 channels can regulate important physiological processes such as blood pressure, breathing and bladder control
