Researchers Discover Proteins That Could very Soon Restore Damaged Hearing and Irreversible Deafness This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 72%. (I'm a bot) Using genetic tools in mice, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine say they have identified a pair of proteins that precisely control when sound-detecting cells, known as hair cells, are born in the mammalian inner ear. Like sports fans performing "The wave" in a stadium, precursor cells along the spiral shape of the cochlea turn into hair cells along a wave of transformation that stops when it reaches the inner part of the cochlea. Follistatin appeared to have the opposite behavior of Activin A. Its levels were low in the outermost part of the cochlea when precursor cells were first starting to transform into hair cells and high at the innermost part of the cochlea's spiral where precursor cells hadn't yet started their conversion. It seems, based on our findings like in the ear, the two proteins perform a balancing act on precursor cells to control the orderly formation of hair cells along the cochlear spiral." In these animals, precursor cells transformed to hair cells too early, causing hair cells to appear prematurely all along the cochlear spiral. Looking more closely at why overproduction of follistatin results in disorganized hair cells, the researchers found that high levels of this protein caused precursor cells to divide more frequently, which in turn made more of them convert into inner hair cells in a haphazard way. Summary Source | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: cell#1 hair#2 cochlea#3 Activin#4 precursor#5 Post found in /r/UpliftingNews, /r/AutoNewspaper and /r/SDauto. NOTICE: This thread is for discussing the submission topic. Please do not discuss the concept of the autotldr bot here.

for more copy & past link https://ift.tt/2OFyE4V by autotldr