Chicken Hair Cell Regeneration

Congratulations, Mitsuo and Nesrine, on a beautiful publication in Cell Reports. When our lab developed a new method to ablate all avian hair cells in their auditory organ, we knew it would be necessary to show the time course and additional details on regeneration and recovery. In this paper, Mitsuo found that the regenerated hair cells are re-innervated in a unique way that is different from how they are connected to the nervous system in the first place during embryonic development. Our interpretation of this finding is that repairing a damaged cochlea is done differently than initially assembling the pieces. This unique way of repair might be necessary to ensure that the new hair cells are correctly “plugged in” to the correct neuronal pathways and not hooked up to a wrong frequency, but this is a bit speculative. It is impressive to see that within five weeks, a completely deaf bird completely recovers naturally and hears as well as before the insult.
Here is a link to the paper.