Chili peppers help to unravel the mechanism of pain

Tuesday, February 24, 2009 - 07:07 in Biology & Nature

Capsaicin, the active ingredient in chili peppers, is most often experienced as an irritant, but it may also be used to reduce pain. A new work published by Drs. Feng Qin and Jing Yao in this week's PLoS Biology uses capsaicin to uncover novel insight into how pain-receptor systems can adapt to painful stimuli. Sensory systems are well known to adapt to prevailing stimuli. For example, adaptation happens when your eyes adjust from a dark movie theater during a matinee to the bright sunlight outside. Whether pain receptors truly adapt or rescale their responses (versus simply desensitizing) has been an open question.

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