Determination of cell types in Chicken Utricle

Hair cells are the final sensory cells in the cochlea that transfer the mechanical energy of vibration of air to electrochemical energy that fire the auditory nerves. Mammalian hair cells cannot regenerate after damage, for instance after exposure to loud sound or ototoxic antibiotics such as aminoglycoside, which is still an absolute essential for treatments of many fatal diseases. In contrast to mammalian hair cells, chicken utricle hair cells (HC) can regenerate from the supporting cells (SC) underneath. Furthermore, there are two visually different regions in chicken utricle striola (S) and extrastriola (ES) regions as shown in Fig. 1, containing both HCs and SCs. The hypothesis is that type I and type II HCs are in S and ES regions respectively, where type I HCs are especially regenerative. The motivation of current work is to study the gene expression of chicken hair cells to potentially help with regeneration of human hair cells. On top of distinguishing HC and SC from gene expressions, it is also within the area of interest of current work to identify the differences between type I and type II hair cells. The first aim of the project is to identify the cell types in chicken utricle from 220 gene expression as positive real numbers from 192 cells. The genes of interest are selected based on relevance to known HCs and SCs specific genes in human, and potential relevance to regeneration. This is an ongoing research in the field, and the data is obtained from Dr. Scheibinger and Prof. Heller at Stanford Medicine School Department of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery.