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Updated: Dec 30, 2025

Investigating Outer Hair Cell Motility with a Combination of External Alternating Electrical Field Stimulation and High-speed Image Analysis
Published on: July 18, 2011
Simulation of the efficiency of inner hair cell secretion in the auditory pathway
Abstract:
Sound coding involves several stages of processing along the auditory path. Specifically, the Inner Hair Cells (IHC) act as sensory receptors and transduce acoustic information -frequency, intensity and duration of the stimulus- into neuronal signals. In this work, a stochastic model was implemented to achieve a better understanding of the IHC-auditory nerve synapse, specifically, the process of Ready Releasable Pool (RRP) vesicle exocytosis, a complicated process to study experimentally because current protocols do not provide adequate temporal resolution, in the order of milliseconds. The presented model allows predicting the efficiency of glutamate release towards explaining maturation changes or disease impacts in the auditory pathway.
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