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. Â
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.Â