Stereo Balance

Inside our ears, in a region called the cochlea, we have millions of tiny hair-like bristles called stereocilia. They wave around as sound floods over them, like arms at a music festival (although 10,000-times smaller). Watching this cochlea Coachella inside mouse ears, researchers find clues to how our hearing works. A high-powered microscope peers inside, highlighting waving stereocilia in purple, bunched together at 'roots' highlighted in green. The team find that properly formed bundles of stereocilia rely on a careful balance of a protein called taperin. Mice with too little or too much taperin lose their precisely arranged stereocilia, and have impaired hearing. They believe that taperin helps the stereocilia to remain flexible after a blast of loud noise which might otherwise lead to permanent damage in mice or human ears.

Written by John Ankers

John Ankers

Writer

A former researcher in systems biology, John is now an online biology tutor and professional coach supporting the wellbeing of scientists and NHS professionals. He's writing, too, of course.

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• Image from work by Inna A. Belyantseva & Chang Liu, and colleagues
• Laboratory of Molecular Genetics, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD; Dept of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Journal of Cell Biology, June 2025