Chilli's red hot pain hope
Wednesday December 22nd, 2010
British researchers say they have found DNA which helps give chilli pepper its burning effects.
The
discovery offers new insights into the way the human body feels pain -
and researchers say it may offer new treatments.
Capsaicin, the "hot" compound in chillis, has been a target of pain researchers for some time.
The discovery at Aberdeen University, Scotland, UK, is of a portion of DNA known which is responsible for switching on a pain gene, known as substance-P.
The discovery was confirmed when the scientists tested capsaicin on the switch - and found it successfully activated the gene.
Project leader Dr Alasdair MacKenzie said the Kosterlitz centre in Aberdeen has developed new technologies to identify the switch, reported yesterday in the journal Neurosignals.
He said: "This is very important as medical geneticists now know that 88 per cent of heritable diseases such as arthritis, obesity, depression, heart disease and dementia may be caused by faulty genetic switches rather than faults in the genes themselves."
Scientist Dr Lynne Shanley, post-doctoral scientist, said: “Finding the switch was like looking for a needle in a haystack. However, by comparing the genetic sequences of humans, mice and chickens we were able to find a short stretch of DNA that had remained unchanged since before the age of dinosaurs."
Neurosignals December 21 2010
Tags: Diet & Food | Genetics | Pain Relief | UK News
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