Related Experiment Video
Updated: Dec 30, 2025

Morphological and Functional Evaluation of Ribbon Synapses at Specific Frequency Regions of the Mouse Cochlea
Published on: May 10, 2019
Diverse Mechanisms of Sound Frequency Discrimination in the Vertebrate Cochlea
1Department of Neuroscience, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
Abstract:
Discrimination of different sound frequencies is pivotal to recognizing and localizing friend and foe. Here, I review the various hair cell-tuning mechanisms used among vertebrates. Electrical resonance, filtering of the receptor potential by voltage-dependent ion channels, is ubiquitous in all non-mammals, but has an upper limit of ~1 kHz. The frequency range is extended by mechanical resonance of the hair bundles in frogs and lizards, but may need active hair-bundle motion to achieve sharp tuning up to 5 kHz. Tuning in mammals uses somatic motility of outer hair cells, underpinned by the membrane protein prestin, to expand the frequency range. The bird cochlea may also use prestin at high frequencies, but hair cells <1 kHz show electrical resonance.
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