Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Neubarth, Nicole L
• Emanuel, Alan J
• Liu, Yin
• Springel, Mark W
• Handler, Annie
• Zhang, Qiyu
• Lehnert, Brendan P
• Guo, Chong
• Orefice, Lauren L
• Abdelaziz, Amira
• DeLisle, Michelle M
• Iskols, Michael
• Rhyins, Julia
• Kim, Soo J
• Cattel, Stuart J
• Regehr, Wade
• Harvey, Christopher D
• Drugowitsch, Jan
• Ginty, David D

Titel

Meissner corpuscles and their spatially intermingled afferents underlie gentle touch perception

Ist Teil von

• Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 2020-06, Vol.368 (6497)

Ort / Verlag

United States: The American Association for the Advancement of Science

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

American Association for the Advancement of Science

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Meissner corpuscles are mechanosensory end organs that densely occupy mammalian glabrous skin. We generated mice that selectively lacked Meissner corpuscles and found them to be deficient in both perceiving the gentlest detectable forces acting on glabrous skin and fine sensorimotor control. We found that Meissner corpuscles are innervated by two mechanoreceptor subtypes that exhibit distinct responses to tactile stimuli. The anatomical receptive fields of these two mechanoreceptor subtypes homotypically tile glabrous skin in a manner that is offset with respect to one another. Electron microscopic analysis of the two Meissner afferents within the corpuscle supports a model in which the extent of lamellar cell wrappings of mechanoreceptor endings determines their force sensitivity thresholds and kinetic properties.