Carrie Veilleux
Midwestern University-Glendale, AZ·Ecology & Evolution
With our fingertips we can judge texture, shape, vibration and movement, whether we are checking if fruit is ripe, gripping a branch or using a tool. This precision touch is central to how humans and other primates sense and handle their world.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
Neuroscience
- Topics
touch
somatosensation
mechanoreceptors
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Link genes to traits in precision touch by comparing the activity of touch-related genes, measured by transcriptome sequencing, with the density and shape of mechanoreceptors (touch-sensing cells) in tissues from 18 mammal species.
- Measure how diet, manual dexterity and tool use relate to precision touch across primates, combining tissue measurements with behavioral observations of how animals handle food.
- Test whether living in trees rather than on the ground is linked to differences in precision touch, by comparing mechanoreceptor anatomy and touch-gene expression across species with different movement styles.
- Evaluate whether primates are uniquely specialized for precision touch, comparing them with non-primate mammals and using public genomic databases to trace natural selection on touch genes.
More about the research
Yet it is much less understood than vision, hearing or smell. A long-standing question is whether primates are uniquely specialized for fine touch, and which aspects of an animal's lifestyle pushed touch to evolve the way it did. Answering it bears on how early primates arose and how highly sensitive touch evolved in the human lineage.
Why it matters
This is basic research on how the sense of touch evolved. It aims to show which features of diet, tool use and life in trees shaped fine touch in primates, including the human lineage. A shared biobank of tissues and RNA from many endangered and poorly studied mammals could support future research on these species. A museum exhibit is planned to help the public learn how the senses work.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Andrew Mongue
University of Florida, FL·Ecology & Evolution
Construct a global phylogeny of bagworm moths from field-collected species to count how many times extreme female sexual dimorphism, including winglessness and loss of legs and eyes, evolved independently.
Diana Rennison
University of California-San Diego, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Survey replicate freshwater threespine stickleback populations with population genomics to measure how genetic parallelism, the repeated use of the same genes, translates across biological levels from genes to traits.
Vladimir Pravosudov
University of Nevada-Reno, NV·Ecology & Evolution
Identify the genetic basis of specialized spatial memory in food-caching mountain chickadees by combining whole-genome sequence and sequence capture data with spatial cognition measurements.
The school
Midwestern University-Glendale: 2 labs on PI Pages, $14M a year on research.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.