Powering Down Hearing

Your hearing depends on hair cells in your inner ear. When loud noises or ageing destroys these cells, it's their mitochondria – the powerhouses of your cells – that are involved in their downfall. Moreover, faults in over 30 genes key to mitochondrial activity are known to cause deafness. Yet little is known about hair cell mitochondria biology. Researchers now investigate in zebrafish. Using serial block-face scanning electron microscopy, they found mitochondria are more densely packed in hair cells (pictured, white) compared with support cells. These mitochondria also had a distinct architecture – multiple small mitochondria in the upper halves of cells and fine networks in the lower halves. In zebrafish with a faulty opa1 gene – a gene known to be mutated in human deafness – mitochondria function was disrupted. In mutants where hair cell mechanics were disrupted, so too was mitochondria architecture. This furthers our understanding of mitochondria-related deafness.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Andrea McQuate, Sharmon Knecht and David W Raible
• Department of Biological Structure, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, March 2023