Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 24, 2025
A Surgical Procedure for the Administration of Drugs to the Inner Ear in a Non-Human Primate Common Marmoset Callithrix jacchus
Published on: February 27, 2018
Early development of the cochlea of the common marmoset, a non-human primate model
Makoto Hosoya1, Masato Fujioka2,3, Junko Okahara4,5
1Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Keio University School of Medicine, 35 Shinanomachi Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, 160-8582, Japan.
Background:
Fine-tuned cochlear development is essential for hearing. Owing to the difficulty in using early human fetal samples, most of our knowledge regarding cochlear development has been obtained from rodents. However, several inter-species differences in cochlear development between rodents and humans have been reported. To bridge these differences, we investigated early otic development of a non-human primate model animal, the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus).
Methods:
We examined 20 genes involved in early cochlear development and described the critical developmental steps for morphogenesis, which have been reported to vary between rodents and marmosets.
Results:
The results revealed that several critical genes involved in prosensory epithelium specifications showed higher inter-species differences, suggesting that the molecular process for hair cell lineage acquisition in primates differs considerably from that of rodents. We also observed that the tempo of cochlear development was three times slower in the primate than in rodents.
Conclusions:
Our data provide new insights into early cochlear development in primates and humans and imply that the procedures used for manipulating rodent cochlear sensory cells cannot be directly used for the research of primate cells due to the intrinsic inter-species differences in the cell fate determination program.
