David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian made waves with the science of distributed senses
THE IDEA that there are five senses goes back at least as far as Aristotle. But it is not quite true. Four of the senses are obvious, not least because each is associated with a particular organ: sight with the eyes, hearing with the ears, taste with the tongue and smell with the nose. But the fifth classical sense, touch, is distributed over the whole surface of the body, albeit that it is particularly concentrated in the fingertips.
The winners were David Julius of the University of California, San Francisco and Ardem Patapoutian of Scripps Research, a biomedical institute in San Diego. Dr Julius did the pioneering work on temperature. He and Dr Patapoutian, acting independently, then advanced this work. After that, Dr Patapoutian moved on to look at mechanical stimulation.
The fragments which induced capsaicin sensitivity turned out to be parts of a protein now called TRPV1. This belongs to a class of proteins called ion channels, which do many jobs in the body. As predicted, TRPV1 turned out to be heat sensitive. When the temperature rises above 43°C, the channel through it opens, permitting ions of calcium and sodium to pass. That chemical signal stimulates a nerve impulse which tells the brain about the temperature change.
Dr Patapoutian then went on to look at the sensation of touch. Molecular biology having advanced in the interim, he was able to work with whole proteins—or, rather, the genes for whole proteins. He identified 72 such proteins expressed in a mechanically sensitive cell line that looked like potential touch-sensitive sensitive ion channels. He tested them one at a time, by silencing the genes that encode them and poking the resulting cells. The first 71 silencings had no effect.
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