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Editor’s Note: The 2016 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience took place November 12-16, 2016, in San Diego, US. Part 2, below, of our coverage of the meeting…

A nerve injury can render even the softest touch painful. This hypersensitivity, known as tactile allodynia, stems in part from the actions of stomatin-like protein-3 (STOML3), a protein that’s…

Chronic pain is thought to involve the long-lasting strengthening of synapses, akin to what happens during the formation of new memories. This phenomenon, known as long-term potentiation (LTP), is…

Social influences can profoundly modulate pain in both humans and rodents. A handful of studies have shown that when two animals experience the same pain stimulus while housed together,…

Mechanosensation—the ability to sense force—is a fundamental sensory process in people and other animals. However, while researchers have made progress in identifying molecular mechanisms of mechanosensation in animal studies,…

Allodynia is a hallmark of neuropathic pain in which normally non-painful stimuli, such as a light touch, evoke pain. Researchers have recently taken strides toward understanding the neuronal circuitry…

The following is Part 2 of a three-part series of selected presentations from the 35th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Pain Society (APS) held May 11-14, 2016, in…

Voltage-gated sodium channels found in sensory neurons—and the channel dubbed Nav1.7 in particular—are prime targets when it comes to developing the next generation of pain drugs. Nav1.7 is an…

Government officials, physicians, and the public are increasingly aware of a need to move away from using opiate drugs to treat chronic pain. More and more, doctors are searching…

A new study identifies a very small population of about 30 specialized parvocellular oxytocin (OT) neurons that project simultaneously to the supraoptic nucleus (SON) of the hypothalamus and to…

Spinal FKBP51, a gene known to play a role in the brain’s stress response, is important for the development and maintenance of chronic pain, reports a new mouse study…

Microglial activation has long been implicated in neuropathic pain, but the signal from injured sensory neurons that prompts this response has remained elusive—until now. Researchers led by Zhonghui Guan,…