Summary: Researchers have identified a protein that is critical for pain signaling.

Source: Salk Institute.

Sensory neurons regulate how we recognize pain, touch, and the movement and position of our own bodies, but the field of neuroscience is just beginning to unravel this circuitry. Now, new research from the Salk Institute shows how a protein called p75 is critical for pain signaling, which could one day have implications for treating neurological disorders as well as trauma such as spinal cord injury.

“The p75 protein is a busybody. It plays a role in many different signaling pathways,” says Salk Professor Kuo-Fen Lee, holder of the Helen McLoraine Chair in Molecular Neurobiology and co-senior author of the new work. “This complexity makes the protein interesting to study. In this latest research, we discovered that, in addition to its other functions…