Researchers have identified the protein that enables mammals to sense cold, filling a long-standing knowledge gap in the field of sensory biology.
University of Michigan researchers have identified the protein that enables mammals to sense cold, filling a long-standing knowledge gap in the field of sensory biology., could help unravel how we sense and suffer from cold temperature in the winter, and why some patients experience cold differently under particular disease conditions.
In a 2019 study, researchers in Xu's lab discovered the first cold-sensing receptor protein in Caenorhabditis elegans, a species of millimeter-long worms that the lab studies as a model system for understanding sensory responses. GluK2 is primarily found on neurons in the brain, where it receives chemical signals to facilitate communication between neurons. But it is also expressed in sensory neurons in the peripheral nervous system .
"A bacterium has no brain, so why would it evolve a way to receive chemical signals from other neurons? But it would have great need to sense its environment, and perhaps both temperature and chemicals," said Xu, who is also a professor of molecular and integrative physiology at the U-M Medical School.
The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health. All procedures performed in mice were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and performed in accordance with the institutional guidelines.
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