Enlarge / The protein that allows us to sense touch is big and complicated. (credit: PDB)
Today’s Nobel Prize is in “Physiology or Medicine,” which often means “biology” these days. And 2021 is no exception, as two researchers have won for their discoveries of how humans detect their immediate environment through the sense of touch. David Julius won half the prize for identifying the protein that allows us to sense painful heat or its chemical mimic from chili peppers, and Ardem Patapoutian got the other half for figuring out how we sense physical touch.
The predominant finding made by both researchers relied on a clever scheme that allowed them to identify the critical gene involved in a fairly specific process. But that discovery opened the door to a lot of follow-on work. In the case of temperature, the work enabled the discovery of a small family of related proteins that all sense different aspects of heat or cold. And in the case of touch, the finding reveals that the same protein manages to track all sorts of stresses and strains inside the body.
Feel the burn
People who enjoy a good chili pepper will often talk about the heat generated by the chemicals it contains. That’s not a metaphor—over the years, researchers have figured out that a key chemical in hot peppers, called capsaicin, activates the same nerve cells that are triggered by unpleasant heat.
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