The find of a novel pain gene has been reported by researchers at Children's Hospital Boston.
![Human Pain Gene Discovery Reported from Fruitfly Study Human Pain Gene Discovery Reported from Fruitfly Study](https://images.medindia.net/health-images/1200_1000/human-back.jpg)
The discovery, uncovered in a genome-wide hunt for pain genes in fruit flies, will lead to the development of new analgesics, the identification of risk factors for chronic pain and improved decision-making about the suitability of surgical treatment for different patients, according to Clifford Woolf, director of the F.M. Kirby Center and Program in Neurobiology at Children's.
Nearly 12,000 genes were targeted for mutations specifically in nerve cells, using RNA interference (RNAi) technology.
The team then exposed the different mutant flies to noxious heat, and identified the ones that failed to fly away - and zeroed in on those with mutations that appeared to be specific to pain.
They found that a member of the family of calcium channels should be studied further. Other studies with mice demonstrated that this gene controls sensitivity to noxious heat in mammals as well as flies.
Further, functional MRI imaging revealed that it controls the processing of thermal pain signals in the brain: the heat pain signal seems to arrive appropriately at the thalamus, an early processing center, but does not travel to higher order pain centers in the cortex.
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The international team plans further studies on the other pain genes identified in the fly screen.
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"This is another way to personalize medicine."
The find is published in the November 12th issue of Cell.
Source-ANI