Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

byllz t1_it56upi wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in Why does alcohol kill bacteria, but not the cells that our bodies are composed of? by Chairman_Mittens

I thought alcohol caused the burning feeling because it was a TRPV1 agonist, the same as capsaicin, not because of any cellular damage.

2

Jaedos t1_it5blil wrote

That... is a whole new realm of reading I'll have to do. It looks like there's both epithelial non-neuronal, and neuronal presentations of the protein, but I can't tell if the epithelial activation results in a brain-aware pain signal, or simply impacts the local biology such as increasing glandular activity, etc.

You are absolutely correct that ethanol is considered a strong agonist for TRPV1 though. I'll have to add an edit about the specifics of the burning sensation and read up some more on this.

2