Single-unit auditory nerve fibre responses of young-adult and aging gerbils

This dataset contains the raw waveforms and spike times from single auditory nerve fibres of young-adult, middle-aged, and old Mongolian gerbils raised in a quiet environment, while presenting a variety of acoustic stimuli to assess the functioning of the single fibres. Gerbils were anesthetized with ketamine/xylazine injections and auditory brainstem responses (a type of compound response) were recorded to derive a measure of their general hearing sensitivity. The auditory nerve was approached dorsally through the cerebellum and a sharp, high-impedance glass electrode was slowly moved through the nerve. Single-unit recordings were made for as long as the surgical preparation was stable. Afterwards, spikes in the data were identified, data files were organized into NWB files of one single unit, data were analysed to characterise the fibre, and a set of criteria was used to ensure the single unit derived from the auditory nerve bundle. The dataset contains not only responses to simple acoustic stimuli to characterise the fibres, but also to more complex stimuli, such as speech logatomes in background noise and Schroeder-phase stimuli. Methods and data validation of this dataset are described in detail in a manuscript with doi: 10.1038/s41597-024-03259-3.