Neanderthal gene linked to increased pain sensitivity

They also showed that in a sample of British people, those who had inherited the Neanderthal version of NaV1.7 tend to experience more pain than others.“It’s a first example, to me, about how we begin to perhaps get an idea about Neanderthal physiology by using present-day people as transgenic models,” says Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who led the work with Hugo Zeberg at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The mutated version of the gene was found on both sets of chromosomes in all three Neanderthals, hinting that it was common across their populations.NaV1.7 acts in the body’s nerves, where it is involved in controlling whether and to what extent painful signals are transmitted to the spinal cord and brain. To investigate how mutations might have altered Neanderthals’ nerves, Zeberg expressed their version of NaV1.7 in frog eggs and human kidney cells — model systems useful for characterizing proteins that control neural impulses. In nerve fibres, this would lower the threshold for conveying a painful signal, says Zeberg.He and Pääbo then looked for humans with the Neanderthal version of NaV1.7. In a 2019 study, Boeckx flagged three other proteins involved in pain perception that differ between modern humans and Neanderthals4.