Feng Wang: Visualizing thermosensation with in vivo functional imaging

Feng earned his PhD at the Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai under the supervision of Dr. Xu Zhang, and went on to complete postdoctoral training in Dr. Yves De Koninck’s lab at the Mental Health Institute in Quebec City, Canada. His research focuses on the physiological sensitivity of primary afferents and the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying somatosensation in both normal and pathological conditions. He is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Dentistry at Laval University.

Speaker

Feng Wang (Laval University, Canada)

Topic

His lab employs cutting-edge optical and behavioral approaches to investigate how populations of sensory neurons - including primary afferents and spinal cord neurons - encode various natural stimuli, particularly temperature, and how these coding mechanisms are altered in pathological conditions such as chronic pain. In this talk, he will present their recent findings showing that distinct subpopulations of cold-sensitive primary afferents, each with different response kinetics, are responsible for sensing the dynamic and steady-states of a cold stimulus, respectively. He will also discuss how the information encoded by these cold-sensitive primary afferents is integrated at the spinal cord level.

Publications

- Esmaeilou Y, Elbaz M, Côté SL, Desrosiers P, Papalampropoulou-Tsiridou M, Keramidis I, Pérez AC, Côté DC, Deschênes M, De Koninck Y, Wang F. TRPM8 afferents are essential for steady-state, not transient innocuous thermal sensing. In preparation.

- Wang F, Ferland S, Côté SL, Lorenzo LE, Bélanger E, Larqué P, Li CL, Godin A, Duan B, Côté DC, Paquet ME, De Koninck Y. Thermal and mechanical modalities converge in the noxious range. bioRxiv. 2025 March 10; 2025.03. 03.641313.

- Wang F, Bélanger E, Côté SL, Desrosiers P, Prescott SA, Côté DC, De Koninck Y. Sensory afferents use different coding strategies for heat and cold. Cell Rep. 2018 May 15; 23(7): 2001-2013.

Please contact james.poulet@mdc-berlin.de if you would like to meet Feng.