Auditory system articles within Nature

Featured

  • Article |

    Behavioural studies with deafened rats show that locus coeruleus activity and plasticity are key to rapid adaptation to and long-term hearing performance with cochlear implants.

    • Erin Glennon
    • , Silvana Valtcheva
    •  & Robert C. Froemke

  • Article |

    In Drosophila melanogaster, female mating decisions are governed by female-specific descending neurons that integrate input from auditory neurons that respond to features of the song of a conspecific male and central neurons that encode the mating status of the female.

    • Kaiyu Wang
    • , Fei Wang
    •  & Barry J. Dickson

  • Letter |

    Ikzf2, which encodes the transcription factor Helios, is identified as a crucial regulator of gene expression in maturing cochlear outer hair cells, and overexpression of Ikzf2 in inner hair cells induces prestin expression and electromotility.

    • Lauren Chessum
    • , Maggie S. Matern
    •  & Ronna Hertzano

  • Letter |

    Training of mice to associate a particular sound frequency with locomotion results in selective suppression of cortical responses to that frequency during movement, consistent with a motor-dependent form of auditory cortical plasticity.

    • David M. Schneider
    • , Janani Sundararajan
    •  & Richard Mooney

  • Letter |

    A native Amazonian society rated consonant and dissonant chords and vocal harmonies as equally pleasant, whereas Bolivian city- and town-dwellers preferred consonance, indicating that preference for consonance over dissonance is not universal and probably develops from exposure to particular types of polyphonic music.

    • Josh H. McDermott
    • , Alan F. Schultz
    •  & Ricardo A. Godoy

  • Article |

    A study of pup retrieval behaviour in mice shows that oxytocin modulates cortical responses to pup calls specifically in the left auditory cortex; in virgin females, call-evoked responses were enhanced, thus increasing their salience, by pairing oxytocin delivery in the left auditory cortex with the calls, suggesting enhancement was a result of balancing the magnitude and timing of inhibition with excitation.

    • Bianca J. Marlin
    • , Mariela Mitre
    •  & Robert C. Froemke

  • Article |

    Here auditory cortex excitatory neurons are shown to decrease their activity during locomotion, grooming and vocalization, and this decrease was paralleled by increased activity in inhibitory interneurons; these findings provide a circuit basis for how self-motion and external sensory signals can be integrated to potentially facilitate hearing.

    • David M. Schneider
    • , Anders Nelson
    •  & Richard Mooney

  • Letter |

    Cortical inhibitory interneurons expressing vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP) are shown to specialize in suppressing the activity of other inhibitory interneurons and are activated by reinforcement signals, thus increasing the activity of excitatory neurons by releasing them from inhibition; these results reveal a cell-type-specific microcircuit that tunes cortical activity under certain behavioural conditions.

    • Hyun-Jae Pi
    • , Balázs Hangya
    •  & Adam Kepecs

  • Letter |

    A new approach has been developed in order to achieve the stepwise differentiation of inner ear sensory epithelia from mouse embryonic stem cells in a three-dimensional culture: this process, which mimics normal development and produces cells that have functional characteristics of mechanosensitive hair cells, is hoped to provide further insights into inner ear development and disorder.

    • Karl R. Koehler
    • , Andrew M. Mikosz
    •  & Eri Hashino

  • Letter |

    In an auditory frequency discrimination task in rats, channelrhodopsin-2-mediated stimulation of corticostriatal neurons biases decisions in the direction predicted by the frequency tuning of the stimulated neurons, whereas archaerhodopsin-3-mediated inactivation biases decisions in the opposite direction.

    • Petr Znamenskiy
    •  & Anthony M. Zador

  • Letter |

    Optogenetic induction of phasic, but not tonic, firing in VTA dopamine neurons induces susceptibility to stress in mice undergoing a subthreshold social-defeat paradigm and in previously resilient mice that have been subjected to repeated social-defeat stress, and this effect is projection-pathway specific.

    • Dipesh Chaudhury
    • , Jessica J. Walsh
    •  & Ming-Hu Han

  • Letter |

    A combination of structural, computational and biophysical tools is used to characterize the bond between tip-link proteins protocadherin 15 and cadherin 23, which have an essential role in inner-ear mechanotransduction; the bond, involving an extended protein handshake, is found to be affected by deafness mutations and is mechanically strong enough to resist forces in hair cells, adding to our understanding of hair-cell sensory transduction and interactions among cadherins.

    • Marcos Sotomayor
    • , Wilhelm A. Weihofen
    •  & David P. Corey

  • Books & Arts |

    Andrew King enjoys a personal account of the impact of sound on life, evolution and the brain.

    • Andrew J. King

  • News & Views |

    A fossil from the Early Cretaceous provides insight into the evolution of the hearing apparatus in mammals. Anchoring the eardrum was, it seems, an essential step in freeing the middle ear from the jaw. See Article p.181

    • Anne Weil

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • Nina Veselka
    • , David D. McErlain
    •  & M. Brock Fenton

  • Letter |

    Neural responses are variable, but it is unclear whether this variability carries important information or is just noise. Here the authors characterize the sensitivity to small fluctuations of in vivo cortical networks in rat barrel cortex in the context of neural coding, finding that perturbations are amplified and cause an increase in local firing rate. Simulations suggest that this amplification leads to variations in the system that are pure noise and, therefore, unsuited for carrying a reliable temporal code.

    • Michael London
    • , Arnd Roth
    •  & Peter E. Latham

  • Letter |

    To build a representation of the auditory world, neuronal circuits in neonatal rodents exhibit plasticity, allowing sensitivity to the pattern of sensory inputs. At this time, neurons construct a receptive field, which relies on a balance of excitatory and inhibitory inputs. Here, excitation and inhibition were found to be co-tuned upon hearing onset, but later an adjustment in the excitatory input strength occurred. Thus a fine adjustment in synaptic inputs, rather than more radical changes such as input pruning, may refine mature receptive fields.

    • Yujiao J. Sun
    • , Guangying K. Wu
    •  & Li I. Zhang

  • Letter |

    A nerve cell sends signals to others through action potentials, which begin at the 'initial segment' of the neuron's axon. Here it is shown that the length of this initial segment increases in bird auditory neurons that have been deprived of auditory stimulation. The resulting increase in intrinsic excitability — the tendency to fire action potentials — represents a new form of neuronal plasticity and might contribute to the maintenance of the auditory pathway after hearing loss.

    • Hiroshi Kuba
    • , Yuki Oichi
    •  & Harunori Ohmori

  • Letter |

    Echolocation is usually associated with bats. Many echolocating bats produce signals in the larynx, but a few species produce tongue clicks. Here, studies show that in all bats that use larynx-generated clicks, the stylohyal bone is connected to the tympanic bone. Study of the stylohyal and tympanic bones of a primitive fossil bat indicates that this species may have been able to echolocate, despite previous evidence to the contrary, raising the question of when and how echolocation evolved in bats.

    • Nina Veselka
    • , David D. McErlain
    •  & M. Brock Fenton

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