Current concepts of hair cell differentiation and planar cell polarity in inner ear sensory organs

Phylogenetically and ontogenetically, vertebrate development led to the generation of several inner ear sensory organs. During embryogenesis, cell fate specification determines whether each progenitor cell differentiates into a sensory hair cell or a supporting cell within the common sensory primordium. Finally, all sensory epithelia of the inner ear consist of a hair cell/supporting cell mosaic, albeit with anatomical differences depending on the sensory organ type. Hair cells develop a polarized bundle of stereovilli that is of functional importance for mechanotransduction. After initiating stereovillar development, hair cells align their bundles in a coordinated fashion, generating a characteristic hair cell orientation pattern, a process referred to as planar cell polarity (PCP). The pathway that controls PCP in the inner ear needs both to establish the development of a polarized morphology of the stereovillar bundle of the hair cell and to organize a systematic hair cell alignment. Because the hair cell orientation patterns of the various inner ear organs and vertebrate species differ fundamentally, it becomes apparent that in vertebrates, different aspects of PCP need to be independently controlled. In spite of important progress recently gained in the field of PCP research, we still need to identify the mechanisms (1) that initiate molecular asymmetries in cells, (2) that guide the transmission of polarity information from cell to cell, and (3) that consistently translate such polarity information into morphological asymmetries of hair cells.