Utricle Laser Timecourse

Much of human hearing loss is caused by loss of auditory hair cell (HC) function. Mammals cannot regenerate these essential mechanoelectrical transducers of sound. However, birds have retained the ability to regenerate HCs from surrounding supporting cells. To better understand hair cell regeneration, we have expression profiled the sensory epithelia from chicken cochleae and utricles. Pure sensory epithelia, consisting of HCs plus supporting cells, were damaged with either neomycin or laser treatment. Changes in gene expression at various points during regeneration were compared to undamaged control cultures on a custom microarray that interrogates the vast majority of transcription factor (TF) genes. These experiments involved multiple biological samples and hundreds of microarray comparisons. Keywords: timecourse Hair-cell lesions in cultured utricle sensory epithelia were created by laser microsurgery. Sensory epithelia was allowed to recover for 30min, 1hr, 2hr, or 3hr. There are at least 2 biological samples per timepoint, and experiments include technical replicates as well as dye-switches for a total of 33 microarrays.