Sorry I missed you

My editor’s pick:

painresearchforum.org/paper/mitoch...

“...the findings suggest that nociceptors have evolved to “dial down” the ETC pathway, enabling them to be unusually resilient to oxidative and other intracellular stresses.“

Agree this is an amazing paper. Adding a shout out to my NIH intramural colleagues Nick Ryba (the last author) and Mark Hoon (the second author) for this landmark study.

Say hi for me. And don’t let him talk you into trying Surströmming.

However, my guess is the discrepancy w/ Qi et al arise because in that study, they record from the entire MrgB4 lineage, which we show includes brush sensitive cells (Extended Data Fig. 3D).

Qi et al were more controlled in their force application as they were seeking to determine precise mechanical activation thresholds. Thus, we may have overlooked small differences in mechanosensitivity by using naturalistic soft brushing and pinching.

Some clarification: Because our findings were not what we expected, we went to great lengths to verify them. We imaged both TG (Figs 1-2) and lumbar DRG (Ext Fig 3d). To definitively ID cells, we used two methods: post-hoc in situ (Fig 1, Ext Fig 2) + the Cre-tdT line from earlier studies (Fig 2).

co-author @dimacd.bsky.social pointed out that the link was truncated in my post. Hope this works: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

And a teaser… stay tuned. This work is the appetizer to his major work, which we hope to wrap up soon.