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This year, the Nobel committee awarded US Scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian the Nobel Prize 2021 for Physiology or Medicine award for their work on sensory receptors for temperature and touch.
FREMONT, CA: In our daily lives, we interact with the environment around us and receive and analyze much information through touch. The perception of heat and cold is a fundamental task that our nervous system does daily. How does our nervous system generate specific impulses based on different temperatures from external stimuli of touch? One may ask, and the answer is now available.
The US scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine 2021 for their pathbreaking discovery, which gives humanity a better understanding of how heat is perceived through touch by our nervous system.
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David used Capsaicin, a compound that is found in chili peppers responsible for inducing a burning sensation. Through his research, he discovered a heat receptor named TRPV1. This breakthrough could empower the global healthcare community to understand how our nervous system induces electric signals by different temperatures. On the other hand, Patapoutian worked on the concept of mechanical stimulus to cell receptors and its consequences. How mechanical forces can induce specific signals in vertebrates was one of the critical objectives of the study. He also identified a specific mechanosensitive ion channel which was named Piezo1. This single gene is responsible for inducing signals when cells are subjected to mechanical pressure.
This radical discovery by this year’s Nobel Prize laureates has endowed a better understanding of how the human nervous system induces signals based on different temperatures and mechanical forces. This discovery will have a positive influence on the treatments of many diseases associated with chronic pain.
David Julius is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. He was born in New York in 1955 and completed his Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of California, Berkeley. David was also a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, New York. Ardem Patapoutian was born in 1967 in Beirut, Lebanon. After migrating to Los Angeles, USA, he received a Ph.D. in 1996 from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA. Ardem was also a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. Since 2000, he is working as a scientist at Scripps Research, La Jolla, California, where he is currently a Professor.
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