The Nobel prize in medicine or physiology of 2021 is awarded to David Julius and Arden Pataputian for their discoveries on how we can sense temperature and touch. Julius, he started out wanting to know what the capsaicin, the molecule in chili peppers why it makes us sweat and feel hot.
So, he identified the receptor for that and it turned out to be a receptor for pain and for heat. And of course, the discovery of this receptor makes it possible for us to develop treatment strategies how to deal with pain.
And that is a very important question, of course, a challenge to deal with. So, it is of utmost importance to know the mechanism of this which the identification of the pain receptor makes possible.
The other price Pataputian, he discovered the receptor that makes us feel a touch. To feel when the skin is touched, and he called this receptor piezo one and then he discovered piezo two, there are two of these receptors completely new family of receptors.
It is important to understand what touch does to humans because we know that it is a good thing normally and maybe this can be used to make us feel better to understand that touching our skin is activating all kinds of processes for our well-being. Two researchers are awarded this year and both of them had their own strategy to identify these novel receptors.
Julius, he started with a cDNA library, it's called, it's copies out of all proteins that are synthesized in a cell. And then he put them into another cell and made a long way of selection to finally find the cell that was expressing this protein that he was had an hypothesis existed.
And now he could prove that it existed. Whereas Pataputian had a similar but still another strategy where he instead locked down protein after protein to finally identify which protein that kind of turned off the cell's responsiveness to pressure.
And in that way, this is a very time consuming and long work but finally, both of them reach their goal to identify these two new receptor families.
