Deep inside the ear, specialised cells called hair cells detect vibrations in the air and translate them into sound. Ten years ago, Stefan Heller, PhD, Professor of Otolaryngology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, USA, came up with the idea that if you could create these cells in the laboratory from stem cells, it would go a long way toward helping scientists understand the molecular basis of hearing in order to develop better treatments for deafness (May 2010). Read more
Here's a research update from Matthew W. Kelley, Ph.D, chief of the Developmental Neuroscience Section of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, MD, USA (December 2009). Read here
Research is currently taking place at the University of Utah into genes that have a role in ear development. These studies will ultimately contribute to our understanding of the genetic "blueprint" for building an ear. Read more
Scientists continue to study how we hearing and what can go wrong with that process, and they are making new discoveries at a startling rate. Here is a report that discusses the importance of certain microRNAs in maintaining hearing (April 2009)
Researchers from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in the United States and a group of international scientists have found an exception to the rule that each gene in the human body is supposedly responsible for encoding one particular protein (November 2008). Read more
Researchers from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in the United States and others have now learned that two proteins that have been implicated in some forms of inherited deafness are responsible for building and maintaining stereocilia (March 2009). Read more
When you play a piano, the strings may supply the musical tones, but if it werent for the wooden hammers striking the strings, you wouldnt hear a note. New research from the National Institute on Deafness and Communication Disorders in the United States suggests that the ear may be built in much the same way. Read more
An international team of scientists, led by researchers at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, has shed new light on the little understood motor protein called dynein, thought to be involved in progressive neurological disorders such as motor neurone disease (February 2009). Read more
A research study funded by the Royal National Institute for Deaf People and Deafness Research UK, led by researchers at the University of Sheffield, has successfully isolated human stem cells and discovered how to turn these into either cells that behave like sensory hair cells or auditory neurons (April 2009). Read more
Scientists thought they had a good model to explain how the inner ear translates vibrations in the air into sounds heard by the brain. Now, based on new research from the Stanford University School of Medicine, it looks like parts of the model are wrong (April 2009). Read more
Richard Hallworth, Ph.D., of Creighton University School of Medicine, Omaha, Nebraska, and colleagues describe differences in response to aminoglycoside among inner and outer cochlear hair cells in the March 6 issue of the journal Brain Research (March 2009). Read more
Utah and Texas researchers have learned how quiet sounds are magnified by bundles of tiny, hair-like tubes atop "hair cells" in the ear: when the tubes dance back and forth, they act as "flexoelectric motors" that amplify sound mechanically (April 2009). Read more
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