PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Jinghao Lu
AU  - Bin Chen
AU  - Manuel Levy
AU  - Peng Xu
AU  - Bao-Xia Han
AU  - Jun Takatoh
AU  - P. M. Thompson
AU  - Zhigang He
AU  - Vincent Prevosto
AU  - Fan Wang
TI  - Somatosensory Cortical Signature of Facial Nociception and Vibrotactile Touch Induced Analgesia
AID  - 10.1101/2022.04.14.488349
DP  - 2022 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2022.04.14.488349
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/04/15/2022.04.14.488349.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/04/15/2022.04.14.488349.full
AB  - Pain relief by vibrotactile touch is a common human experience. Previous neurophysiological investigations in animals focused on spinal mechanisms while human studies suggested the involvement of supraspinal mechanisms. Here we asked whether and how the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) is involved in touch induced analgesia. We discovered that in mice, vibrotactile reafferent signals from self-generated whisking significantly reduce facial nociception, which is abolished by specifically blocking touch transmission from thalamus to the barrel cortex (S1B). The presence of whisking altered nociceptive signal processing in S1B neurons. Intrinsic manifold analysis of S1B population activity revealed that whisking pushes the transition of neural state induced by noxious stimuli towards the state encoding non-nocifensive actions. Thus, S1B integrates facial tactile and noxious signals to enable touch mediated analgesia.Teaser Vibrotactile signals modulate barrel cortex population dynamics during touch mediated facial analgesiaCompeting Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.