Dabbling with Piezo2 for mechanosensation

Nature has devised various strategies for sensing food so species can coexist and exploit different types of prey. Sharks can detect amino acids in blood as low as 1 ppb, while hawks and buzzards scan the Earth from a height of ∼10,000 feet looking for rodents. However, not all birds rely on their keen sense of sight to acquire food. Albatross hover above the water to smell floating food and foraging ducks utilize sense of touch to capture insects beneath the water. In PNAS, Schneider et al. (1) examine the molecular alterations in vertebrates that lead to diverse types of feeding behavior. They study foraging birds that rely on distinct sensory input: visual (chickens) vs. tactile (ducks and geese). Dabbling ducks utilize their soft bills/beaks to sense food without visual or olfactory cues just like primates can feel touch through fingertips.Sense of touch is primitive and crucial for survival but still the least-understood sensory modality in the vertebrates. Significant efforts are underway to understand mechanosensation at a cellular and molecular level (2). The hairless skin of mammals detects touch and vibration via specialized corpuscles (Meissner and Pacinian) innervated by rapidly adapting mechanoreceptors. In ducks, the tactile information is carried out by Herbst and Grandry corpuscles located in the glabrous skin of bills, tongue, and oral cavity. In a previous study, the authors established that adult duck’s trigeminal neurons produce robust mechanically activated electrical responses in vitro. In addition, trigeminal ganglia from several species of adult tactile foraging birds contain significantly large-diameter cells, which suggested but did not prove the presence of large mechanoreceptor populations (3).The … [↵][1]1Email: ruhma.syeda{at}utsouthwestern.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1