Dr. Ana Bélen Elgoyhen and her colleagues are doing what she calls the “ant work” in the lab at Argentina’s National Scientific & Technical Research Council in Buenos Aires.
The mechanical and neurological systems that form our sense of hearing are extraordinarily complex. Uncovering and understanding what makes it all work to give us our perception of sound requires researchers taking painstaking, small steps like ants moving one grain of sand at a time to build a nest.
But sometimes a small step reveals part of a much bigger picture and often it’s the result of stumbling across a remarkable discovery. That’s what happened when Dr. Egoyhen was working in the lab at Salk Institute in California.
At the time she was looking for protein receptors (the chemical “messengers” that connect our cells) in the brain. “By chance I found new proteins in the brain that were expressed in the cochlea“.
That discovery earned her numerous awards and led to promising research into the olivocochlear system which plays a key role in regulating the cochlear in two areas .
First, it modulates the signal-to-noise ratio the cochlea processes. Simply put, it adjusts the cochlea to help distinguish a single voice for example in a crowded noisy room.
Second, much like the knob on an amplifier, it controls the volume. “When exposed to overly loud noise,” she says, “it helps protect the cochlea from damage.”
That second function may one day lead to a drug that can help protect our hearing from noise damage. That could be particularly important for workers on a factory floor for example, or for soldiers firing artillery.
One day, before heading out to a night club, hearing protection may come in the form of a pill. But Dr. Elgoyhen is quick to firmly suggest, “that we should all wear plugs.”
While her work is helping deepen our understanding of human hearing she points out there is still so much we don’t know.
“So far we have identified only about one hundred genes that are involved in hearing but we know there are probably over a thousand that we haven’t discovered yet.”
The ants still have a lot of work to do.
