In breakthrough, scientists find pressure sensor in fat tissue

Discover how Nobel laureate Ardem Patapoutian's research on PIEZO channels revolutionizes our understanding of human biology.

In a video uploaded to the internet in November, Ardem Patapoutian, who shared the medicine Nobel Prize in 2021, unbuttoned his cuff and pulled up his sleeve to reveal a tattoo near his elbow. As he flexed his arm, the tattoo came to life. The tattoo was of the PIEZO mechanosensitive channel – a class of proteins that helps us sense pressure – and the flexing demonstrated how the channel opened and closed in response to pressure.

Patapoutian, a molecular biologist and neuroscientist at the Scripps Research institute, California, and Betrand Coste, then a postdoctoral researcher in Patapoutian’s lab, discovered the PIEZO ion channels in 2010.

Ion channels are proteins that have a pore in their structure. In response to certain stimuli, the protein’s structure changes and the pore widens. When this happens, ions can flow through, changing the voltage across a cell’s membrane. If the cell is a neuron, it can use the resulting electric signal to communicate with other neurons. This is how the human nervous system works.

The stimuli that open an ion channel are called its gates. When researchers say voltage-gated ion channels, they mean a particular channel opens when the voltage across a cell membrane changes. Since the ion channels discovered by Patapoutian and Coste were gated by pressure, they called them mechanosensitive ion channels.

They discovered two such channels and named them PIEZO1 and PIEZO2, both from the Greek word ‘piezi’ meaning ‘pressure’.

Since their 2010 discovery, PIEZO channels have been implicated in our ability to sense touch and pain, to understand how our bodies are positioned in space (proprioception), to perceive our body’s internal state (interoception), and to respire, urinate, form blood vessels, regulate bone density, and heal skin wounds.

Two new studies — which independent experts called “pivotal” and a “breakthrough” to this reporter — have now expanded the ambit of PIEZO channels’ functions.