Mis-haired

You may not want hair growing out of your ears, but hairs lying deep inside our ears are essential to us all. Along the cochlea, a spiral-shaped structure of the inner ear, tiny hairs pick up sound and help us hear. The cells that support these hairs are arranged in a dense mosaic, and can't regenerate or repair like many other cells, making some hearing loss conditions hard to treat. A new study analysed cell growth and structure in great detail at four stages of early development (hair cells highlighted pink in a newborn mouse cochlea pictured), and the researchers have made this developmental map freely available. They discovered that genes linked to two known hearing-loss conditions are involved in sensory hair growth, and revealed factors that drive early growth, which may help researchers hoping to steer the growth of stem cells to provide replacement cells for patients.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image by Helen Maunsell, National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• Research from Laboratory of Cochlear Development, NIDCD, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, 20892, USA
• Image copyright held by the photographer
• Research published in Nature Communications, May 2020