Team Amaury FRANÇOIS

Tactile perception and discrimination have been expensively studied throughout the prism of whisker exploration in rodent. This work greatly improved our understanding of the discriminative aspect of touch and how the quality of a tactile stimuli can be associated with other sensory process to help creating a goal directed behaviour. In comparison little is known about the neuronal process of how the rest of the body integrates tactile information, in particular through the skin. Skin and whiskers are not the same organs and thus probably do not share the same physiological function. For example, the skin has been proposed to be a social organ, conveying much more than just discriminative information. This suggests that information coming from skin receptors is not integrated the same way in the central nervous system (CNS). Surprisingly, this process is largely understudied and the neuronal mechanisms and circuits responsible for attributing an emotional value to tactile stimuli are almost unknown.

The overall goal of our lab is to identify the neural networks engaged during affective and pleasurable touch and understand how somatosensory and reward pathways interact to create a goal directed behaviour. We are also interested in pathologies which can be associated with a mis integration of affective touch, such as autism spectrum disorders and depression and anxiety associated with chronic pain.

To reach our goals, the lab uses multiple approaches ranging from sophisticated mouse genetics, in vitro, ex vivo and in vivo calcium imaging and electrophysiology, to molecular biology and behavioral analysis based on machine learning.

This Team is supported by the Impulscience Program (Fondation Bettencourt Schueller) and the agence national de la recherche.