The same mechanism the body uses to react to the sharpness of chili peppers and hot mustards is the one that detects garlic, according to a study in Tuesday's "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."
David Julius, of the department of cellular and molecular pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco, discovered that when a subset of pain neurons in rats activates a cell membrane channel called TRPA1 the result is a release of brain chemicals that stimulate blood vessel dilation and inflammation.
"You can use these natural products as very interesting pharmacological probes of the pain pathways," Julius says.
Susan Travers of Ohio State University says the most interesting finding of the paper is that the neurons that respond to garlic compounds are only a subset of those that respond to the capsaicin in hot peppers.
This type of specificity would give some basis for why people can tell the compounds apart, says Travers, who was not part of Julius' research team.
