BioQuakes

AP Biology class blog for discussing current research in Biology

Tag: ear

Gerbils Can You Hear Me?

By

On October 8, 2012

In Student Post

80 to 90 percent of people suffer from inherited deafness. In a study, scientists have reversed deafness in gerbils. This is a huge step in gene therapy research this month making the possibility of using gene therapy as a cure for deftness one step closer. Genetic therapy is the use of genetic material such as DNA to manipulate a cell and is generally used to treat inherited diseases; in this case scientists used human embryonic stem cells. The gerbils in the study were born deaf. This type of deafness is a birth defect caused by damage to hair cells in the inner ear. These inner ear hair along with auditory neurons which translate sound vibrations from the inner-ear cells to electrical signals are how you can hear. Scientists specifically worked on gerbils whose deafness was caused by a mutation in a gene coding for a protein called vesicular glumamate transporter-3. Even minor alterations to a protein’s primary structure ,such as the movement of a double bond, will cause major defects in the tertiary structure and the function of the protein. The mutated protein in this study vesicular glutamate transporter-3 controls the consumption of glutamate (neurotransmitter) into synaptic vesicles, which join two nerve cells, of the neural cells. This is clearly groundbreaking news this month and has proved the various use of stem cells. How do you feel about the use of embryonic stem cell research? Feel free to comment!!

 

 

selective hearing

By

On May 3, 2012

In Student Post

Two scientists at the University of California, San Francisco  figured out how selective hearing works. Known as the “cocktail party effect,” people are capable of focusing on just one person speaking within a room full of people speaking.

“To understand how selective hearing works in the brain, UCSF neurosurgeon Edward Chang, MD, a faculty member in the UCSF Department of Neurological Surgery and the Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience, and UCSF postdoctoral fellow Nima Mesgarani, PhD, worked with three patients who were undergoing brain surgery for severe epilepsy.”

They had to identify areas in the brain that disable seizures. These are found by looking at the brains activity within a couple of weeks  “with a thin sheet of up to 256 electrodes placed under the skull on the brain’s outer surface or cortex. These electrodes record activity in the temporal lobe — home to the auditory cortex.”

“The new findings show that the representation of speech in the cortex does not just reflect the entire external acoustic environment but instead just what we really want or need to hear.”

If you want to “experiment with the art of hearing,” go to   links.sfgate.com/ZLJH.

 

 

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