Somatosensory system articles from across Nature Portfolio

This study presents an HDB (horizontal diagonal band) – mPFC (medial prefrontal cortex) – thalamus circuit and the cholinergic signaling in mPFC Foxp2⁺ neurons in modulating sensory and affective pain in male mice.

Current tactile sensing solutions face challenges in excessive wiring, high energy demands of AI computing, and limitations in scalability and parallel processing. Here, the authors present a neuromorphic tactile system combining artificial skin and spiking hardware encodes touch with high accuracy at low power.

Psilocybin may help treat chronic pain, possibly due to direct analgesic effects. Here, authors tested psilocybin on acute and chronic pain in three mouse models of pain and found minimal effects on sensory, affective, or functional pain measures.

Intracortical microstimulation can elicit artificial sensations in persons who have lost sensation due to neurological injury or disease. This Review discusses intracortical microstimulation mechanisms, explores emerging approaches and notes challenges to current technologies.

Sridhar et al. examine how electroacupuncture modulates brain activity and connectivity in fibromyalgia using pre- and post-treatment fMRI. They show that electroacupuncture engages somatosensory–insula circuits to link nociceptive-initiated pain with reduced nociplastic widespread pain.

Management of erectile dysfunction has previously focused on symptom management, but attention is now being directed towards interventions that facilitate and retain natural erectile ability, treating the underlying cause of the disorder. In this Perspective article, the authors discuss the potential of electrical neurostimulation of the penis, which is in early stages of development as a restorative therapy, targeting the penile-nerve supply that is impaired by disease states, injury or ageing.

In this Journal Club, Takayuki Yamashita discusses a 2002 study about the role of unmyelinated C-tactile afferents in touch.

Group 2 innate lymphoid cells are crucial for maintaining nerve structure and pain thresholds.

The diverse sensory input provided by physically and socially enriched environments is shown in mice to increase sensory integration and responsiveness to environmental stimuli, whereas social isolation produced the opposite effects.

Functional neuroimaging of individuals before and after they underwent an arm amputation shows that the map of the missing limb in somatosensory cortex remains stable after amputation, with no evidence of reorganization of either the hand or the face, challenging long-standing theories of brain remapping after limb loss.

Neuronal activity drives parvalbumin-expressing interneuron maturation in the mouse cortex via its effects on the transcriptional cofactor PGC1α.