Controlled mechanical displacement was used to stimulate single whiskers in normal and C-fiber depleted rats to quantitatively examine the role of C-fibers in the response properties of barrel cortical cells. C-fiber depletion using neonatal capsaicin treatment increased the barrel single-unit response magnitude to deflection of both principal and adjacent whiskers while there was not any signi...

Each cerebral hemisphere processes sensory input from both sides of the body, but the impact of this convergence on shaping and modifying receptive field properties remains controversial. Here we investigated the effect of chronic deprivation of ipsilateral sensory whiskers on receptive field plasticity in primary somatosensory cortex. In the absence of ipsilateral whiskers, cortical receptive ...

Mammals use tactile end-organs to perform sensory tasks such as environmental exploration, social interaction, and tactile discrimination. However, cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying tactile transduction in tactile end-organs remain poorly understood. The patch-clamp recording technique may be the most valuable approach for detecting and studying tactile transduction in tactile end-or...

Responses of rat trigeminal ganglion neurons to longitudinal whisker stimulation. Rats use their mobile set of whiskers to actively explore their environment. Parameters that play a role to generate movement dynamics of the whisker shaft within the follicle, thus activating primary afferents, are manifold: among them are mechanical properties of the whiskers (curvature, elasticity and taper), a...

In large part, rodents “see” the world through their whiskers, a powerful tactile sense enabled by a series of brain areas that form the whisker-trigeminal system. Raw sensory data arrives in the form of mechanical input to the exquisitely sensitive, actively-controllable whisker array, and is processed through a sequence of neural circuits, eventually arriving in cortical regions that communic...

Although somatosensation in multiple whisker systems has been studied in considerable detail, relatively little information is available regarding whisker usage and movement patterns during natural behaviors. The Etruscan shrew, one of the smallest mammals, relies heavily on its whisker system to detect and kill its highly mobile insect prey. Here, we tracked whisker and body motion during prey...

Previous studies have shown that the receptive field properties, spontaneous activity and spatio-temporal interactions of low-threshold mechanical somatosensory cells in the barrel cortex are influenced by C-fibers. In this study, we examined the effect of C-fiber depletion on response properties of barrel cortex neurons following experience dependent plasticity. Methods: In this study, exte...

Spatial attention is most often investigated in the visual modality through measurement of eye movements, with primates, including humans, a widely-studied model. Its study in laboratory rodents, such as mice and rats, requires different techniques, owing to the lack of a visual fovea and the particular ethological relevance of orienting movements of the snout and the whiskers in these animals....

It is well known that oral inflammation causes tenderness in temporomandibular joints or masseter muscles. The exact mechanism of such an orofacial ectopic hyperalgesia remains unclear. Here, we investigated the functional significance of interaction of nerve growth factor (NGF) and transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) in relation to heat hyperalgesia in the whisker pad skin caused ...