Thermosensory processing: mechanisms and pathways

The application will support basic research in the area of sensory neuroscience and will focus on the mechanisms of thermal coding using a wide range of approaches that include in vivo electrophysiology, behavioural phenotyping, molecular biology, cell biology including culturing and measuring cell markers from primary cultures. The aim is to use a wide range of integrated techniques that will allow a comprehensive understanding of how thermal information is transduced and transmitted to the central nervous system. This will be studied in the normal state but also will allow the study of molecular and neuronal plasticity since abnormal perceptual changes to cooling stimuli are observed in neuropathic pain patients and the same is true for animal models of nerve injury.