The Schneider lab

All organisms, from bacteria to primates are capable of sensing touch. The organs vertebrate animals use for tactile discrimination are incredibly diverse, such as the whiskers of rodents and human hands. Yet many features of tactile processing are conserved across vertebrates. For instance, touch is transduced by sensory neurons that interact with specialized structures in the skin called corpuscles. One major goal of our research is determine how the same general machinery has been optimized in animals capable of exquisite tactile discrimination compared with those that are not. A second related goal is to determine which parts of the nervous system encoding touch (I.e., properties of neurons in primary sensory ganglia, brain regions encoding touch, corpuscles) are most tractable during development and therefore likely to be most adaptable on evolutionary timescales. We think these questions are best studied by comparing tactile processing in related species that range in their ability to use their sense of touch to find food (tactile foragers). Our lab primarily uses ducks as a model organism because of their tactile foraging ability and similarity of bill skin to human glabrous skin. Specific projects in the lab are as follows:

Mapping of RNAseq reads for transcriptional profiling

Description: de novo and genome-guided transcriptome assembly of adult and embryonic duck trigeminal ganglia (from 7 species), bill skin, and foot skin using Illumina RNA sequencing data and downstream data analysis by alignment and statistical software. The goal of this project is to identify transcripts associated with corpuscle development and function, and novel mechanotransducer ion channels.

Personnel:

Eve R. Schneider, PI

Thomas R. Hart, Graduate, Added on MCC cluster on 07/25/2022

(This project has non-UK collaborators but they do not need cluster access.)

Computational methods:

Read processing, transcriptome assembly, read mapping, annotation, and differential expression analysis. All methods are available via freeware or are commercially available.

Software:

Trimmomatic, STAR, HISAT2, NCBI BLAST, Bowtie, BWA, minia package, Jellyfish, Trinity, RSEM, Samtools, Stringtie, R package, DESeq2, edgeR

Positive Selection Analysis of mechanosensory Ion Channels

Waterfowl have adapted to use their bills to forage in a variety of ways including dabbling and straining, diving, and terrestrial grazing. The PIEZO2 protein has a role in rapidly adapting mechanically activated (MA) currents in somatosensory neurons has been conserved in many vertebrates, including birds and mammals. Piezo2 transcripts from seven duck species will be analyzed and calculated to estimate Piezo2’s molecular evolution if under positive selection.

Personnel:

Eve Schneider, PI

Aaron K. West, Fellowship, Added on MCC cluster on 07/25/2022

Computational methods:

Read assembly, phylogenetic analysis. All methods are available via freeware.

Software:

HISAT2, Trinity, samtools, bowtie, Trinotate, BLAST, OrthoFinder, PAML, ClustalW.

Software availability: all programs should be available online for free.

Grants:

Publications: