What are some of the advantages of studying neurons in the dorsal root ganglia (DRG) in particular?
DONG: One advantage is that knockout genes expressed in DRG neurons are not lethal. Even if you delete the entire DRG, it’s not that critical. Animals don’t seem to need pain-sensing neurons, so you can always get animals to survive into adulthood, you can do straight knockouts, and you can study behavior in those animals. In contrast, if you want to knock out genes in the central nervous system, you have to do conditional knockouts, and the promoters to drive those conditional knockouts may not be specific. The behavior for studying processes mediated by the central nervous system, like learning and memory, is also very complicated. Pain and itching behavior is relatively easy to study, and it’s already complicated. Can you describe your recent work into the perception of gentle touch? DONG: We published a paper studying the projection pattern of one of the genes we identified that is highly specific and expressed in DRG neurons. We don’t have functional data yet, but based on previou
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