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Scientists Study Why Some People are More Susceptible to Pain Than Others
The degree of pain experienced after injury or surgery is known to be highly variable between patients, even under nearly identical circumstances, prompting researchers to search for the contribution of genetics to chronic pain susceptibility.
To accelerate research in this field, animal models are proving to be critical to understanding the underlying biology of chronic pain in human patients.
Recently, using a mouse model of chronic pain, Ariel Darvasi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and colleagues identified a region of mouse chromosome 15 that likely contained a genetic variant or variants contributing to pain. However, this region contains many genes and the responsible variant remained unknown.
Darvasi and an international team of researchers have now undertaken two fine-mapping approaches to narrow down the locus to an interval of 155 genes. Then, by applying bioinformatics approaches and whole genome microarray analysis, they were able to confidently identify a single gene, Cacgn2, as the likely candidate.
This gene is known to be involved in cerebellar function and epilepsy, but a functional link to pain had not been described previously.
To further test the potential role for Cacgn2 in chronic pain, the authors utilized a mouse strain harboring a mutant version of the gene that had previously been used in epilepsy research.
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