Abstract
In the 1970s and 1980s, investigators began recording the electrical signals of individual hair cells in excised preparations. The earliest preparations were tuned in the sub-kilohertz range and the hair cells shared fundamental mechanisms of transduction, tuning, and transmission, leading to a view of the canonical hair cell. As inner ear preparations and experiments diversified, however, so did the known properties of hair cells. In particular, mammalian hair cells and synapses of both auditory and vestibular organs show remarkable specializations for response speed and precision. By controlling and recording voltage, the whole-cell patch clamp method allows manipulation of the many voltage-dependent processes that shape hair cell signals and an immediate read-out of signals in the currency of the nervous system.
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Acknowledgments
Work in my laboratory has been supported principally by the U.S. National Institutes of Deafness and Communication Disorders, but our first work on vestibular hair cells was stimulated by the Office of Naval Research; a scientific officer who’d heard Jim Hudspeth speak persuaded the admirals that they ought to fund hair cell research. The ONR also introduced me to Art Popper and Dick Fay, who originated and shepherded, at enormous effort, the Springer Handbook of Auditory Research. Their commitment to the encouragement and dissemination of research on sensory systems of the inner ear has benefitted me and my colleagues in countless ways.
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Eatock, R.A. (2014). Recording from Hair Cells. In: Popper, A., Fay, R. (eds) Perspectives on Auditory Research. Springer Handbook of Auditory Research, vol 50. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9102-6_5
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