The question of how nerves sense touch, pressure and pain has been a long standing question in physiology. Also the question of how drugs can affect the nerve’s ability to feel pain is critical for design of drugs that will influence our perception of pain. In order to understand how we sense pressure and pain, Assoc. Prof. Liz Carpenter’s group at the SGC, in collaboration with Assoc. Prof. Stephen Tucker in Physics and Prof. Mark Sansom in Biochemistry have looked at a family of human ion channels. These are proteins in nerve membranes that are sensitive to stimuli such as the stretching of a membrane, thus allowing nerves to detect stretch.