Restoring Balance

Hearing and balance depend on hair cells with microscopic sensory hairs, bending in response to vibrations caused by sound or movement. Unlike other vertebrates, whose inner ear supporting cells (SCs) can produce new hair cells if needed, mammals lose this ability during development, so any damage leads to permanent hearing loss and balance disorders. The connections between our SCs also change at the same time with an increase in proteins involved in cell adhesion, at the junctions linking cells together. In recent experiments on 8-day-old mouse utricles (a balance organ in the inner ear, pictured, with SCs in yellow), treatment with growth factors reversed these changes, before ultimately encouraging SCs to multiply. Suggesting that the unique changes to cell junctions in mammalian SCs contribute to their inability to renew hair cells, these results indicate promising avenues for future research on hearing and balance defects.

Written by Emmanuelle Briolat

Emmanuelle Briolat

Writer

A researcher specialising in visual signals in Lepidoptera, camouflage and the effects of light pollution, Emmanuelle’s writing covers a range of topics, from biomedical research to children’s books about moth defences.

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• Image from work by Mikolaj M. Kozlowski, Mark A. Rudolf and Jeffrey T. Corwin, published on the cover of Journal of Neuroscience
• Department of Neuroscience, University of Virginia, School of Medicine, Charlottesville, VA, USA
• Image copyright held by and reproduced with permission from the Journal of Neuroscience
• Published in Journal of Neuroscience, March 2020