The functional organization of cutaneous low-threshold mechanosensory neurons
By Lishi Li, M. Rutlin, V. Abraira, Colleen Cassidy, L. Kus, Shiaoching Gong, M. Jankowski, Wenqin Luo, N. Heintz, H. Koerber and 2 more. Cell, 2011
718 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Summary Innocuous touch of the skin is detected by distinct populations of low-threshold mechanoreceptors (LTMRs), which are classified as Aβ-, Aδ- and C-LTMRs. Here, we report genetic labeling of LTMR subtypes and visualization of their relative patterns of axonal endings in hairy skin and the spinal cord. We found that each of the three major hair follicle types of trunk hairy skin; guard, awl/auchene, and zigzag hairs, is innervated by a unique and invariant combination of LTMRs; thus, each hair follicle type is a functionally distinct mechanosensory end organ. Moreover, the central projections of Aβ-, Aδ- and C-LTMRs that innervate the same or adjacent hair follicles form narrow LTMR columns in the dorsal horn. These findings support a model of mechanosensation in which the activities of Aβ-, Aδ- and C-LTMRs are integrated within dorsal horn LTMR columns and processed into outputs that underlie the perception of myriad touch sensations.
Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Molecular Biology, Sensory Systems
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/38ac98b904bfb856f2771e271e57d4d0b027f104
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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
In Sensory Systems
Citations in the corpus
- Wound healing and skin regeneration. (2015, background): “Mascré et al. (2012) used two distinct promoters: Keratin14 that targets basal cells in the epidermis including a progenitor population that proliferates and differentiates, and Involculin that solely targets a committed progenitor cell population.”
- Discriminative and affective touch: sensing and feeling. (2014, background): “visualize their respective terminal endings in hairy skin and spinal cord (Li et al., 2011).”
- iDISCO: a simple, rapid method to immunolabel large tissue samples for volume imaging. (2014, neutral): “Tissue-specific protocols that add steps to preserve integrity of fragile tissues during collection and preparation have been developed, e.g., to study lung tissue (Scott et al., 2014) and adult skin (Li et al., 2011); some of these are likely compatible with iDISCO, but this needs to be tested.”