Professor Nikita Gamper receives MRC award

Unravelling dorsal root ganglion as an intrinsic filtering device

Congratulations to Nikita Gamper (PI) and David Jaffe (Co-I, UT San Antonio, Texas, USA) for receiving £552.5k for their project on  ‘Unravelling dorsal root ganglion as an intrinsic filtering device’. This project builds on their recent discovery that spinal somatosensory ganglia actively filter peripherally-born action potentials traveling along sensory nerves to the CNS, thus, playing an active part in the preliminary processing of somatosensory information. The aim of their project is to unravel basic principles of ganglionic filtering in order to develop new, or improve existing therapeutic interventions. They will use optical and electrophysiological methods in combination with genetic labelling of DRG neurons with defined sensory modalities to obtain accurate morphometry and biophysical parameters of different sensory fiber types. These measurements will generate parameters for realistic computational modelling of the filtering in different types of afferent fibers.