Grant: Project Grant

We are proposing to study the development of our ability to discriminate the location of a painful stimulus on our bodies. To do this we are using the Dcc mouse mutant in which the nerve pathways that relay pain information from the body to the brain are altered in a very specific ways: neurons that normally relay sensation from the left side of the body to the right brain hemisphere, now also relay it to the left brain hemisphere. Our data show that such mice cannot discern whether painful stimuli originate in the left or right side of the body. Humans with DCC mutations also have aberrations in their ability to locate a noxious stimulus on their bodies. To understand such deficits we are proposing to study the organization of connections that relay painful stimuli to the brain of Dcc mutants. The primary goal of our experiments is to use genetic manipulations to study how pain sensation develops, with the hope of gaining insights into new treatments of chronic pain and neurodevelopmental disorders which affect pain sensation, like autism spectrum disorders.