Investigating the Vital Functions of Mice with Skin-Specific Piezo2 Excision

• Juliana Pucciarelli, Neuroscience, University of Delaware
• Christyana Kawar, , University of Delaware

• Joshua Neunuebel, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Delaware, Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Graduate Program, University of Delaware, Bioinformatics Data Science, University of Delaware, University of Delaware

Gentle touch is necessary for successful performance of many animal behaviors and is detected by Piezo2, a mechanosensitive ion channel in the Merkel cells of skin tissue. As Piezo2 is also expressed in other tissues, including the lungs, bladder, and cardiovascular system, we crossed skin-specific Krt14Cre mice with Piezo2-floxed mice to generate mice with Piezo2 excised specifically from the skin, in order to investigate the relationship between touch and social behavior. Because Krt14Cre has been previously shown to be active in non-skin tissue, though, we set out to evaluate whether our breeding scheme would lead to excision in non-skin tissues that could interfere with behavior analyses. To test vital system functioning, heart rate, internal body temperature, and oxygen saturation were recorded from each anesthetized mouse for a two-minute duration. Subjects included adult (8 – 12 weeks old) Piezo2 conditional knockout mice (cKO; n = 33 mice), floxed controls (FX; n = 41 mice), and cre controls (CR; n = 28). We took the mean for each measure for each mouse and compared the results across genotype. We found no significant differences in heart rate (Kruskal-Wallis, H = .0086 , p = 0.9957 ), temperature (H = 1.5832, p = 0.4531), and oxygen saturation (H = 2.8549, p = 0.2399), indicating no effect of genotype on vital measures. This suggests that our current method of generating conditional Piezo2 knockout mice is successful in limiting excision to the skin. The absence of off-target Cre expression is essential to the overarching study of social behavior and touch, as it ensures that any behavioral discrepancies found are not attributable to physiological deficits.