Mis-wiring and Mis-firing

No one likes to be in pain. Luckily, for most of us pain goes away with time or medical help. But when our nervous system becomes damaged, these signals can turn into persistent, debilitating pain in conditions such as neuropathy. Why this happens isn’t clear and means there are inadequate treatment options. Using a technique called multiphoton excitation fluorescence imaging, researchers studied the recovery of nerves after damage in mice to try and understand what causes neuropathy. Three days after toe injury (bottom row), the digit had no sensitivity after loss of two types of sensory neurons, tactile fibres (left) and nociceptors (right), compared to normal (top row). Using this non-invasive imaging technique to observe neuron regrowth, the researchers found that nociceptors were responsible for the chronic pain. As these sensory neurons try to re-establish their network in damaged areas, they terminate abnormally and are stimulated with a lighter touch than before, causing pain.

Written by Sophie Arthur

Sophie Arthur

former Science Communications Officer MRC LMS

Formerly a stem cell biologist, Sophie has since moved into science communication working at the MRC LMS. She also writes an award winning science and education blog Soph talks science.

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• Image from work by Vijayan Gangadharan and colleagues
• Institute of Pharmacology, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature, May 2022