Department of Pharmacology

The skin, our largest sensory organ, transmits somatosensory information, such as touch, pain, temperature, and itch, to the central nervous system. Touch is the first sense to develop and is critical for fundamental tasks and social exchange. A lack of touch in early childhood has catastrophic effects on brain development. Yet, touch remains the least understood sense at the molecular and developmental level. Somatosensory circuits share many assembly strategies with the rest of the nervous system (e.g., laminar organization of connections, pruning and synaptic specificity), but they also have unique features, including the remarkably diverse structures of mechanosensory end organs in the skin. Therefore, understanding the molecular and cellular logic of somatosensory circuit assembly will address many open and underexplored questions in neuroscience.

Using a combination of mouse genetics, sequencing, anatomy, physiology and behavior, we investigate key molecular and cellular mechanisms of somatosensory circuit assembly, which will provide insights for treating nerve injury, pain, and somatosensory dysfunctions in diseases.

Meltzer Lab

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