Research shows how the body senses a range of hot temperatures
Date: 6.3.2012
Research over the past 20 years has shown that proteins on the surface of nerve cells enable the body to sense several different temperatures. Now scientists have discovered how just a few of these proteins, called ion channels, distinguish perhaps dozens of discrete temperatures, from mildly warm to very hot.
Researchers showed that the building blocks, or subunits, of heat-sensitive ion channels can assemble in many different combinations, yielding new types of channels, each capable of detecting a different temperature. The discovery, in cell cultures, demonstrates for the first time that only four genes, each encoding one subunit type, can generate dozens of different heat-sensitive channels.
