When touch is painful: neural coding for affective touch

Mechanical allodynia, when a gentle touch to the skin is painful, is a clinical condition often resulting from nerve damage that has a major impact on quality of life.

Crucial questions remain regarding the neural circuits that signals touch and pain sensation and how these are altered after injury to render touch painful.

I will use novel tools, so-called fiber-photometry and miniscopes, to optically record neural activity in genetically defined cells in deep brain areas of particular relevance to pain that have previously been difficult to access in the awake mouse.

Utilizing optic mechanic designs combined with viral technologies that carries calcium dependent fluorescent markers of activity, this powerful new methodology gives me the opportunity to observe real time activity of specified neural events during complex behaviors in freely moving mice.

In a series of experiments, I will characterize the activity from projection neurons to cortex and reveal the mechanism by which information is transmitted and integrated between distinct cells during sophisticated behavioral measurements.

As these projects advances I will add machine learning tools to investigate the underlying neural substrates important for affective touch processes and how they are altered after nerve injury.

The outputs of this work will shed light on fundamental models used to explain somesthesis and pain, which ultimately can pave the way for new innovative treatments for chronic pain sufferers.