Developmental Timecourse of Mouse Utricles

Vestibular hair cells are mechanoreceptors critical for detecting head position and motion. In mammals, hair cell loss causes vestibular dysfunction as spontaneous regeneration is nearly absent. Constitutive expression of exogenous ATOH1, a hair cell transcription factor, increases regeneration of hair cells, but these cells fail to mature. With the aim of developing an optimized AAV-based ATOH1 gene therapy, we used single-cell RNA-Seq and explored the impact of defined promoters on ATOH1 transgene expression level, timing, effects in distinct cell types, and the maturity of regenerated vestibular hair cells ex vivo and in vivo. Utricles from WT mice were profiled at 14 timepoints from E14.5-P16.