With the news that scientists have discovered the mechanism of how a hairy skin percepts and sends the feel of touch to brain, you may wonder scientists didn’t still know of the mechanism. But science is dynamic mission and it is never 100 percent perfect. Man is only getting nearer to it every other day. The knowledge about how the body works is refined day by day. And it is the only way science can remain alive and keep from being fossilized!

The discovery is about hairy skin. Scholars at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicinehave worked on the transmission of impulse out of touch from a hairy skin to brain. The study also endeavors to cover the processing of the impulses received by the brain.

David Ginty, a professor of neuroscience asks one can feel the turning of a hair on his/her arm, but more interesting is the precisefeeling of a light breeze or a punch of a stick. He says the sense of touch is enormously rich and they have just started to follow how the processing of all these different touches takes place.

The team of people is studying the development and wiring of the nervous system. They target to study each individual cell. Ginty says there are as many as 20 classes of these mechano-sensory cells. Six classes are responsible for light touch and sensing temperature and pain.

The conventional idea about how different senses of touch are transmitted is through varying levels of electric current generated in the nerves—the only way to transmit a message to next nerve cell known so far.

This team applied genetic engineering to mice, so a fluorescent protein was produced in one class of neurons called the C-LTMR (C-type low threshold mechano-sensory receptor). These cells are long enough to have either end on skin and the other in spinal cord. Fluorescent protein helped the cells to be visible under microscope through their entire length.

The cells branched to grab messages from as many as thirty hair follicles. In the case of mice, the neurons did the branching for one-of-the-three types of hair that account for about three-fourth of all hair.The researchers found each type of hair worked like as a different sensory organ as the follicles have different types of neurons.

The next concern of the study has been the transmission. They could succeed in dying the other end of the neuron in the spinal cord to study the behavior exactly. They wondered to find that branches from the different types of neurons collaborate to give a cumulative and rich message. Each of the 3-5000 columns in spinal cord is represented for 100-150 hair follicles.

What about the mechanism the brain follows to interpret the rich signals? They are quite clueless, says Ginty. But they foresee the columns in the spinal cords to be the key in it. They also believe the human beings share the same mechanism though they are not so hairy like mice. But it is still the beginning in the field of study, they swear.

The National institutes of Health, the Howard Hughes Medical Instituteand the Johns Hopkins NINDS core imaging facility have funded for the study. Other authors include Lishi Li, Victoria Abraira, and David Ginty from Johns Hopkins; Shiaoching Gong, Laura Kus and Nathaniel Heintz from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute;C. Jeffery, Colleen Cassidy and Woodbury from University of Wyoming; and H. Richard Koerber and Michael Jankowski from University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.