Makoto Tominaga – författare

This book summarizes the latest advances in pain research. All the chapters were contributed by speakers from Asian Pain Symposium (APS) on Acute and Chronic Pain, which was held in Taipei in 2017. Founded in Kyoto, Japan in 2000, the APS serves as a platform for scientists to present recent findings in pain research and discuss research orientation in this field. APS 2017 focused on novel strategies for pain treatment.

Written by experts from various disciplines, from molecular to functional, and from basic to clinic studies, this book is composed of 18 review articles on the physiology and pathology of pain in these research fields. Specific topics include circuitry, neurotransmitter, physiology, behavior, neuropathology, pharmacology, and the treatments for neuropathic pain disorders. The book is a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students in pain medicine and neuroscience.

This book concerns two subthemes, ''temperature sensing'' and ''temperature-responding systems'', addressing the questions of how temperature is sensed and how temperature is related to biological functions, respectively. Temperature affects various physiological functions and is one of the most important factors in homeostasis. The book seeks to integrate our understanding of temperature-dependent biological phenomena with the development of techniques that detect and regulate local temperatures in cells and organs with high resolution and precision.

Part I: “Temperature sensing” addresses temperature sensing mechanisms by focusing on plasma membrane molecules, intracellular molecules and intracellular metabolic pathways. This part seeks to develop ways to detect and regulate local temperatures at a cellular level, which would facilitate future temperature- sensing research.

Part II: “Temperature- responding systems” focuses on the neural circuits that integrate information concerning ambient temperature sensation, the effects of temperature on metabolic functions and biological rhythms, and mechanisms involved in emotion formation. This part clarifies crosstalk between temperature-responding systems by developing methods to detect and regulate local temperatures in organs.

Authors of this book are leading researchers investigating temperature-sensing mechanisms across a wide range of biological responses from molecular to whole organism levels. The book promotes an integrated understanding of temperature-dependent biological phenomena under a novel discipline, ''thermal biology'', which leads to a novel concept wherein ''temperature'' as a physical quantity could be viewed as an element of new signaling mechanisms.