Sensory Fibers and Pain

Somatosensory neurons from the Dorsal Root and Trigeminal ganglia transduce and relay sensory information in a modality-specific manner. For instance, pain is transmitted by the pain fibers or nociceptors, while touch and thermal information are transmitted by mechanoreceptors and thermoreceptors, respectively.

Upon injury or pathology, these fibers experience changes in their functional properties leading to some manifestations of pain such as mechanical and thermal hyperalgesia. We are interested in understanding those changes in different painful conditions such as nerve injury, burn injury or diabetes.

Sensory fibers innervating different body tissues contain membrane proteins that sense and transduce diverse physical and chemical signals into ionic currents. We are especially interested in understanding how the activity of the force gated channel Piezo2 is regulated in sensory neurons. Therefore, we study the regions impacting on force detection and membrane trafficking. Similarly, we study the function of different Piezo2 variants and accessory proteins in regulating Piezo2 channel activity. To this end, we combine various molecular and electrophysiological tools with cutting-edge microscopy setups to give us new details on the Piezo2 function. Eventually, this novel knowledge would help us to develop new strategies to modulate sensory fiber activity with impact in painful pathologies.