Mechanosensitivity of Tactile Receptors

触觉的感觉系统在施加恒定压力或振动刺激时对皮肤变形高度敏感。目前还不清楚神经细胞的活动是如何编码这些微机械力的。该项目利用生物工程方法，采用一种新颖的隔离皮肤补丁制备方法，精确控制用于底层支撑的材料的刚度、皮肤温度和诸如皮肤压痕、负载和振动触觉点刺激频率等变量，同时从生理上记录单个神经纤维的活动。拉伸测量很重要，因为柔软区域的皮肤可能与僵硬区域的皮肤反应完全不同，并且对完全相同的外部刺激产生完全不同的感觉知觉。这些实验直接测试了压缩和拉伸应力和应变的物理成分的相对作用，以及这些成分如何在神经元活动中编码。研究结果不仅对触觉反应的生理学，而且对理解触觉刺激的感知具有重要意义，因此将对一般的神经元编码研究、复杂生物组织微观力学的生物工程研究产生影响，并可能在触觉辅助阅读等领域具有潜在的应用价值。

The sensory system of touch is highly sensitive to skin deformations during applied constant pressure or vibrational stimuli. It is not yet clear just how the activity of nerve cells encode these micromechanical forces. This project utilizes a bioengineering approach with a novel preparation of an isolated patch of skin, to precisely control the stiffness of the material used for underlying support, the skin temperature, and variables such as skin indentation, load, and frequency of a vibrotactile point stimulus, while physiologically recording activity from single nerve fibers. The tensile measurements are important because skin in soft areas may respond quite differently from skin over stiff areas, and result in quite different sensory perceptions to exactly the same external stimulus. These experiments directly test the relative role of the physical components of compressive and tensile stresses and strains, and how these may be encoded in the neuronal activity. Results will be important not only to the physiology of tactile responses, but to understanding the perception of tactile stimuli, and so will have impact on studies of neuronal coding in general, on bioengineering studies of micromechanics of complex biological tissues, and may have potential application in areas such as tactile reading aids.