Topic: peripheral sensory neurons

Neuropathic pain (NeuP) is a global health problem, with clinical manifestations including spontaneous (non-evoked) chronic pain (i.e. burning sensation) and altered somatosensory perception. To date, we still lack a detailed understanding of the molecular mechanisms driving NeuP. In preclinical mouse studies of NeuP, the main behaviour endpoints often fail to reflect typically observed patient symptoms, and the routine use of male subjects across diverse age ranges likely masks potential age- and sex-dependent variations. We aim to investigate the impact of age and sex on pain-related behavio

Spontaneous activity in peripheral sensory neurons has been associated with pain in people with chronic neuropathic and musculoskeletal conditions. It can also be observed in rodent models of chronic pain, where it has traditionally been studied by making electrophysiology recordings from nerve fibres emerging from the dorsal root ganglion. However, these experiments are technically challenging, low-throughput, and prone to bias, with small diameter fibres being most at risk of being under sampled. More recently, in vivo calcium imaging has been adopted to study sensory neuron activity in rode

Sustained action potential firing (SAPF) is a feature shared by multiple neuronal types and is crucial for stimulus encoding, neural communication and circuit plasticity. We aimed at unveiling the mechanisms underlying SAPF in Peripheral Sensory Neurons (PSNs), a convenient experimental model for studying single-cell excitability. Current-clamp recordings in primary-cultured PSNs revealed that tonic depolarization elicits Subthreshold Membrane Potential Transients (SMPTs) in 82% of this cells, and statistical analyses indicates that larger and faster SMPTs are causally associated with SAPF. Ph