• Ewan Smith's profile

    I'm male

    • What I do

      Naked mole-rats…living without pain?

      Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience that most people are familiar with. I am interested in pain signaling mechanisms: how are noxious stimuli detected and transmitted? Moreover, how these signaling pathways are modulated in chronic pain conditions such as arthritis.

      Tissue acidosis is a common factor to many painful conditions and therefore understanding how acid induces pain would be of potential benefit in the search for new drug targets. Interestingly the African naked mole-rat is an organism that DOES NOT respond to acid as a noxious stimulus. I aim to try and discover what makes the naked mole-rat unique in this aspect -answering this puzzle may help explain how acid induces pain in other animals and humans. A further oddity of naked mole-rats is that they do not develop thermal hyperalgesia (think of how painful a warm shower is on sun burnt skin). This phenomenon is also under investigation. For more details, see Park et al. (2008) PLoS Biol. 6, e13

      I also am involved with projects to look at the interaction of stomatin like proteins with ASICs, see Wetzel C. et al. (2007) Nature. 445,206-9.

    • Affiliations

      Current

    • Interests

      Mechanisms of pain transduction focusing on the unique phenotype of the African naked mole-rat which does not respond to acid as a painful stimulus.

    • Projects

      Investigating the insensitivity of naked mole-rats to acid as a noxious stimulus.

      Investigation the lack of thermal hyperalgesia in naked mole-rats.

      Interaction of stomatin like proteins with ASICs

    • Publications

      • Persistent pain: the contribution of NaV1.9. The Journal of physiology (2008) (Epub 06 Mar 2008) PubMed ID:(18325975)

      • Park T, Lu Y, Jüttner R, Smith E, Hu J, Brand A, Wetzel C, Milenkovic N, Erdmann B, Heppenstall P, Laurito C, Wilson S, Lewin G. Selective inflammatory pain insensitivity in the African naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber). PLoS biology 6 (1) , e13 (2008) PubMed ID:(18232734)

      • Cadiou H, Studer M, Jones N, Smith E, Ballard A, McMahon S, McNaughton P. Modulation of acid-sensing ion channel activity by nitric oxide. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 27 (48) , 13251-60 (2007) PubMed ID:(18045919)

      • Smith E, Cadiou H, McNaughton P. Arachidonic acid potentiates acid-sensing ion channels in rat sensory neurons by a direct action. Neuroscience 145 (2) , 686-98 (2007) (Epub 29 Jan 2007) PubMed ID:(17258862)

      • Smith E, Zhang X, Cadiou H, McNaughton P. Proton binding sites involved in the activation of acid-sensing ion channel ASIC2a. Neuroscience letters 426 (1) , 12-7 (2007) (Epub 08 Aug 2007) PubMed ID:(17881127)

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