‘Holy Grail’ of Hearing: True Identity of Pivotal Hearing Structure Is Revealed

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
1:00 p.m. EDT/6:00 p.m. London time

Contact:
Jennifer Wenger
(301) 496-7243
jwenger@mail.nih.gov

	Stereocilia on top of auditory hair cells Top: Scanning electron microscopy shows the stair-step pattern of stereocilia. Bottom: Fluorescence microscopy image shows the presence of CDH23 (green) at the point where each short stereocilium (red) meets the side of its taller neighbor.

Our ability to hear is made possible by way of a Rube Goldberg-style process in which sound vibrations entering the ear shake and jostle a successive chain of structures until, lo and behold, they are converted into electrical signals that can be interpreted by the brain. Exactly how the electrical signal is generated has been the subject of ongoing research interest.

In a study published in the September 6 issue of the journal Nature, researchers have shed new light on the hearing process by identifying two key proteins that join together at the precise location where energy of motion is turned into electrical impulses. The discovery, described by some scientists as one of the holy grails of the field, was made by researchers at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA.