Lectures and seminars Neurophysiology seminar: Sensory Neurons of Touch
Welcome to an online seminar with Professor David Ginty, Harvard Medical School, USA on Friday 15 October at 15:00. This seminar hosted by doctor Saida Hadjab is part of the Neurophysiology Seminar Series at the Department of Neuroscience. Join the seminar via Zoom.
Title
Sensory Neurons of Touch
Speaker
David Ginty, Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, USA
Ginty Laboratory overview
Our relationship with the physical world is rich, complex, and essential for life. How does the nervous system encode the component dimensions of touch –pressure, texture, vibratory frequency, adhesiveness, wetness, compliance– and topographically superimpose them with respect to location, direction, and speed of movement of a tactile stimulus? Where in the nervous system are these elemental features of touch combined for object recognition and reaction? Research in the Ginty laboratory explores the properties and functions of mechanosensory neurons whose mechanosensitive endings are embedded within the fabric of the skin as well as the functional organization of the spinal cord touch circuitry and its role in the neural encoding of touch. The lab also investigates development of touch neurons and the subcortical touch circuitry, following the assumption that if we know how it’s built, we can better understand how it works.
Selected publications
The cortical representation of touch reflects extensive subcortical integration of signals from mechanoreceptor subtypes.
Emanuel, A.J., Lehnert, B.P., Panzeri, S., Harvey, C.D., and Ginty, D.D.
In press at Nature (2021)
Mechanoreceptor synapses in the brainstem shape the central representation of touch.
Lehnert, B.P., Santiago, C., Huey, E.L., Emanuel, A.J., Renauld, S., Africawala, N., Alkislar, I., Zheng, Y., Bai, L., Koutsioumpa, C., Hong, J.T., Magee, A.R., Harvey, C.D., and Ginty, D.D.
In press at Cell (2021). bioRxiv
Parallel ascending spinal pathways for affective touch and pain.
Choi S, Hachisuka J, Brett MA, Magee AR, Omori Y, Iqbal NU, Zhang D, DeLisle MM, Wolfson RL, Bai L, Santiago C, Gong S, Goulding M, Heintz N, Koerber HR, Ross SE, Ginty DD
Nature 2020 11;587(7833):258-263
Meissner corpuscles and their spatially intermingled afferents underlie gentle touch perception.
Neubarth NL, Emanuel AJ, Liu Y, Springel MW, Handler A, Zhang Q, Lehnert BP, Guo C, Orefice LL, Abdelaziz A, DeLisle MM, Iskols M, Rhyins J, Kim SJ, Cattel SJ, Regehr W, Harvey CD, Drugowitsch J, Ginty DD
Science 2020 06;368(6497):
Targeting Peripheral Somatosensory Neurons to Improve Tactile-Related Phenotypes in ASD Models.
Orefice LL, Mosko JR, Morency DT, Wells MF, Tasnim A, Mozeika SM, Ye M, Chirila AM, Emanuel AJ, Rankin G, Fame RM, Lehtinen MK, Feng G, Ginty DD
Cell 2019 08;178(4):867-886.e24