Marcin Szc­zot

Title

The periph­er­al code of pain rev­e­lead by activ­i­ty labelling

Abstract

The over­ar­ch­ing goal of sen­so­ry neu­ro­science is to under­stand how the activ­i­ty of diverse sen­so­ry neu­rons gen­er­ates con­scious and sub­con­scious per­cep­tion and how this infor­ma­tion is com­mu­ni­cat­ed to the brain in health and disease. 

A key chal­lenge in this field, par­tic­u­lar­ly in pain and somatosen­so­ry research, is the lack of effi­cient tools to explore gen­er­al cel­lu­lar and mol­e­c­u­lar mech­a­nisms under­ly­ing these process­es. To facil­i­tate that, we have devel­oped a method that allows high-through­put cell class func­tion and gene dis­cov­ery in vivo. 

Using this approach in com­bi­na­tion with organ selec­tive stim­u­la­tion we are able to iden­ti­fy cells specif­i­cal­ly involved in dif­fer­ent types of inte­ro­cep­tive and cuta­neous sig­nalling. Guid­ed by these dis­cov­er­ies, we have demon­strat­ed a rapid, con­served neu­ronal path­way for the sen­sa­tion of acute pain evoked by hair fol­li­cle stim­u­la­tion con­served between rodents and humans.

Biog­ra­phy

Marcin Szc­zot is an Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor at Linköping Uni­ver­si­ty, Swe­den, where he leads a research group with­in the Depart­ment of Bio­med­ical and Clin­i­cal Sci­ences (BKV) and the Cen­ter for Social and Affec­tive Neu­ro­science (CSAN). His research focus­es on map­ping the exten­sive net­work of nerve cells in the human gas­troin­testi­nal tract to bet­ter under­stand the mech­a­nisms under­ly­ing stom­ach pain. 

Orig­i­nal­ly from Opole, Poland, Szc­zot earned his PhD in bio­physics from Wro­claw Med­ical Uni­ver­si­ty. He sub­se­quent­ly con­duct­ed research on mechanosen­sa­tion at the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health (NIH) in the Unit­ed States. In 2019, he was appoint­ed as a Wal­len­berg Acad­e­my Fel­low, a pres­ti­gious recog­ni­tion that sup­ports his ongo­ing research into the gas­troin­testi­nal ner­vous system. 

https://​liu​.se/​e​n​/​r​e​s​e​a​r​c​h​/​c​s​a​n​/​l​a​b​s​/​s​z​c​z​o​t​-​lab