Ricardo Paricio-Montesinos, Frederick Schwaller, Annapoorani Udhayachandran, Florian Rau, Jan Walcher, Roberta Evangelista, Joris Vriens, Thomas Voets, James FA Poulet, Gary R Lewin

Humans detect skin temperature changes that are perceived as warm or cool. Like humans, mice report forepaw skin warming with perceptual thresholds of less than 1°C and do not confuse warm with cool. We identify two populations of polymodal C-fibers that signal warm. Warm excites one population, whereas it suppresses the ongoing cool-driven firing of the other. In the absence of the thermosensitive TRPM2 or TRPV1 ion channels, warm perception was blunted, but not abolished. In addition, trpv1:trpa1:trpm3^−/− triple-mutant mice that cannot sense noxious heat detected skin warming, albeit with reduced sensitivity. In contrast, loss or local pharmacological silencing of the cool-driven TRPM8 channel abolished the ability to detect warm. Our data are not reconcilable with a labeled line model for warm perception, with receptors firing only in response to warm stimuli, but instead support a conserved dual sensory model to unambiguously detect skin warming in vertebrates.

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Ricardo Paricio-Montesinos interviewed in Sunday’s News 15- Wärmeempfinden funktioniert anders als erwartet

Neuron. 106(5):830-841.e3 (2020)