Nerve cells that sense touch grow the appropriate endings for hairy or hairless skin based on cues from the skin itself, rather than through predetermined programming, according to research led by Harvard Medical School scientists and published Aug. 21 in Developmental Cell.
Nerve cells that sense touch grow the appropriate endings for hairy or hairless skin based on cues from the skin itself, rather than through predetermined programming, according to research led by Harvard Medical School scientists and published Aug.
In contrast, those that end up in hairy skin, which covers more than 90 percent of the body surface, have end organs called lanceolate complexes with lower sensing acuity but capable of detecting nonspecific stimuli, such as touching the skin or wind blowing through hair. Although the different nerve endings in hairless and hairy skin became distinguishable within a week after birth, these neurons looked identical in utero, which meant that their differences arise later in development. This finding gave the first clue that development of the highly sensitive Meissner corpuscles, or the less sensitive lanceolate end organs, is not predetermined but might be dictated by final-destination skin type, Koutsioumpa said.
In another experiment, the researchers worked with mice carrying a mutation that gave them hairless skin not only on their paw pads, but on the tops of their paws as well. Although this mutation presumably affected just the skin itself, an examination of the sensory neurons innervating the paw tops showed that they developed highly sensitive Meissner corpuscles, just like those in the paw pad skin, suggesting that a signal from the skin had influenced neural type development.
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