Auditory system articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural processes underlying vocal self-monitoring are unclear. Here, the authors show that vocal suppression of auditory cortex operates on two time-scales with different temporal and acoustic precision, suggesting distinct predictive modulations.

    • Joji Tsunada
    • , Xiaoqin Wang
    •  & Steven J. Eliades

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Pharmacological inhibition of gamma-secretase induced partial recovery of hearing in animal models. Here, the authors present the safety and efficacy results and key learnings of the First in Human Phase I/IIa study of a gamma-secretase inhibitor in patients with acquired Hearing Loss.

    • Anne G. M. Schilder
    • , Stephan Wolpert
    •  & Athanasios G. Bibas

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The identity of hair cells’ mechanoelectrical transduction (MET) channel-complex components is unknown. Here, the authors used multiple biochemical, genetic, and functional approaches to show that mouse hair cells utilize Piezo1 and Piezo2 isoforms as part of the MET-complex component.

    • Jeong Han Lee
    • , Maria C. Perez-Flores
    •  & Ebenezer N. Yamoah

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Previous work has identified cells in L2/3 of auditory cortex which strongly respond with bursting to a specific learned chord, but not to single component tones in an auditory task. Here the authors show that these cells correlate with the behavioral relevance of the learned composite sounds.

    • Ruijie Li
    • , Junjie Huang
    •  & Hongbo Jia

  • Article
    | Open Access

    To understand speech, our brains have to learn the different types of sounds that constitute words, including syllables, stress patterns and smaller sound elements, such as phonetic categories. Here, the authors provide evidence that at 7 months, the infant brain learns reliably to detect invariant phonetic categories.

    • Giovanni M. Di Liberto
    • , Adam Attaheri
    •  & Usha Goswami

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social learning through observing conspecifics can facilitate the acquisition of behaviors. Here, the authors show in Mongolian gerbils that auditory cortex is necessary for social learning of an auditory discrimination task, and that social exposure improves neuronal coding of auditory task cues.

    • Nihaad Paraouty
    • , Justin D. Yao
    •  & Dan H. Sanes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The auditory system adapts to properties of sounds reaching the ear, but it is unclear whether this affects the way sounds are perceived. Here, the authors found that auditory responses in the brain predict changes in the perception of sounds, suggesting that adaptation shapes the way we hear.

    • Christopher F. Angeloni
    • , Wiktor Młynarski
    •  & Maria N. Geffen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Malaria mosquitoes use their ears to detect the flight tones of mating partners in the swarm as part of the courtship ritual. Here, the authors describe the auditory role of octopamine as a modulator of auditory plasticity in malaria mosquitoes and identify the main receptors involved in this process.

    • Marcos Georgiades
    • , Alexandros Alampounti
    •  & Marta Andrés

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural dynamics underlying speech comprehension are not well understood. Here, the authors show that phonemic-to-lexical processing is localized to a large region of the temporal cortex, and that segmentation of the speech stream occurs mostly at the level of diphones.

    • Xue L. Gong
    • , Alexander G. Huth
    •  & Frédéric E. Theunissen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The function of TRPA1 channels in the mammalian cochlea is poorly understood. Here, the authors show that TRPA1 channels in supporting cells of the organ of Corti mediate contractile responses that may contribute to temporary shifts in hearing thresholds after noise exposure in mice.

    • A. Catalina Vélez-Ortega
    • , Ruben Stepanyan
    •  & Gregory I. Frolenkov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mutations in PCDH15 cause deafness and blindness in Usher syndrome 1 F, but gene therapy is difficult because the PCDH15 sequence is too large for AAV vectors. Here, the authors engineered a miniPCDH15 that fits in AAV and rescues hearing in mouse Usher syndrome 1F models.

    • Maryna V. Ivanchenko
    • , Daniel M. Hathaway
    •  & David P. Corey

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Speech unfolds faster than the brain completes processing of speech sounds. Here, the authors show that brain activity moves systematically within neural populations of auditory cortex, allowing accurate representation of a speech sound’s identity and its position in the sound sequence.

    • Laura Gwilliams
    • , Jean-Remi King
    •  & David Poeppel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The auditory striatum, the tail portion of dorsal striatum, is implicated in decision-making. This study uncovers a phasic mechanism within the nigrostriatal system that regulates auditory decisions by modulating ongoing auditory perception.

    • Allen P. F. Chen
    • , Jeffrey M. Malgady
    •  & Qiaojie Xiong

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social interaction involves processing semantic and emotional information. Here the authors show that in the macaque monkey lateral and superior temporal sulcus, cortical activity is enhanced in response to species-specific vocalisations predicted by matching face or social visual stimuli but inhibited when vocalisations are incongruent with the predictive visual context.

    • Mathilda Froesel
    • , Maëva Gacoin
    •  & Suliann Ben Hamed

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How cortical areas interact during vocalization is not fully understood. Here the authors show that when bats vocalize, the behavioral function of emitted sounds determines the direction of information flow between frontal and auditory cortices.

    • Francisco García-Rosales
    • , Luciana López-Jury
    •  & Julio C. Hechavarría

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The role of translaminar feedback projections between layer 5 and layers 2/3 in sensory processing remains unclear. Here, the authors show that ascending projections from layer 5 suppress superficial layers, and that this translaminar feedback sharpens feature selectivity in the primary auditory cortex.

    • Koun Onodera
    •  & Hiroyuki K. Kato

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Brain-wide axonal projections of single neurons have been extensively reconstructed without any functional characterization. The authors present a method that allows for developing a precise one-to-one map of both projection patterns and functional features of single neurons in mice.

    • Meng Wang
    • , Ke Liu
    •  & Xiaowei Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Gene therapy using Adeno-associated viral vectors (AAV) rescues hearing and balance deficits in mouse models of human disorders. Here, the authors show that AAVAnc80L65 allows efficient cochlear gene transfer in nonhuman primates, and motivate future studies to evaluate gene therapy for hearing and balance disorders.

    • Eva Andres-Mateos
    • , Lukas D. Landegger
    •  & Luk H. Vandenberghe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Prestin, expressed in outer hair cell (OHC), belongs to the Slc26 transporter family and functions as a voltage-driven motor that drives OHC electromotility. Here, the authors report cryo-EM structure and characterization of gerbil prestin, with insights into its mechanism of action.

    • Carmen Butan
    • , Qiang Song
    •  & Joseph Santos-Sacchi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural and computational mechanisms underpinning pitch perception remain unclear. Here, the authors trained deep neural networks to estimate the fundamental frequency of sounds and found that human pitch perception depends on precise spike timing in the auditory nerve, but is also adapted to the statistical tendencies of natural sounds.

    • Mark R. Saddler
    • , Ray Gonzalez
    •  & Josh H. McDermott

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In the primary auditory cortex, visual or tactile stimuli can modulate acoustically-driven activity. Here, the authors show that circuits linking the primary somatosensory cortex to both the auditory midbrain and thalamus allow tactile inputs to modulate auditory thalamocortical processing.

    • Michael Lohse
    • , Johannes C. Dahmen
    •  & Andrew J. King

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although Hippo signaling restricts regeneration in many mammalian organs, the pharmaceutical tools available to modulate the pathway have been limited. Here, the authors report a small molecule that may inhibit a key element in the Hippo cascade and may activate regenerative responses in several mammalian tissues.

    • Nathaniel Kastan
    • , Ksenia Gnedeva
    •  & A. J. Hudspeth

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sensory hair cells develop an asymmetric architecture to restrict stimulus detection to a single axis. Here the authors identify GPR156 as directing a 180-degree reversal in hair cell orientation through Gαi, downstream of EMX2 in the mouse inner ear and zebrafish lateral line.

    • Katie S. Kindt
    • , Anil Akturk
    •  & Basile Tarchini

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Hearing requires inner hair cell (IHC) stereocilia deflection, believed to result from hydrodynamic coupling due to the lack of contact with the tectorial membrane (TM). Here the authors show that IHC stereocilia are TM-embedded, and calcium rich structures in TM may facilitate sound transduction.

    • Pierre Hakizimana
    •  & Anders Fridberger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Spontaneous activity generated in the cochleae propagates into the central auditory system to promote circuit formation before hearing onset. Here, the authors reveal the important role of cholinergic efferent modulation in coordinating bilateral spontaneous activity and the emergence of functional responses.

    • Yixiang Wang
    • , Maya Sanghvi
    •  & Michael Crair

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How thalamic sensory relays participate in plasticity upon associative fear learning and stable long-term sensory coding remains unknown. The authors show that auditory thalamus neurons exhibit heterogeneous plasticity patterns after learning while population level encoding of auditory stimuli remains stable across days.

    • James Alexander Taylor
    • , Masashi Hasegawa
    •  & Jan Gründemann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Despite its wide and growing use, the mechanisms by which in vivo vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) exerts its therapeutic benefits are still largely unknown. Here, the authors show in mice that pupil dilation is a reliable and noninvasive biosensor for titratable VNS-evoked cortical neuromodulation by acetylcholine.

    • Zakir Mridha
    • , Jan Willem de Gee
    •  & Matthew James McGinley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Different languages rely on different vocal sounds to convey meaning. Here the authors show that language-general coding of pitch occurs in the non-primary auditory cortex for both tonal (Mandarin Chinese) and non-tonal (English) languages, with some language specificity on the population level.

    • Yuanning Li
    • , Claire Tang
    •  & Edward F. Chang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The conversion of auditory and vestibular stimuli into electrical signals is initiated by force transmitted to a mechanotransduction channel through the tip link. Here authors show that a single tip-link bond is more mechanically stable relative to classic cadherins, and that the double stranded tip-link connection is stabilized by single strand rebinding facilitated by strong cis-dimerization domains.

    • Eric M. Mulhall
    • , Andrew Ward
    •  & Wesley P. Wong

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Aponte et al. show that cortical direction selectivity to frequency modulated sounds is shaped by asymmetric signal amplification within recurrent circuits. Optogenetics and network modelling demonstrate that this asymmetry arises due to broad spatial topography of SOM cell mediated inhibition.

    • Destinee A. Aponte
    • , Gregory Handy
    •  & Hiroyuki K. Kato

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Existing tools to study hearing are limited. Here the authors report Bio-OptoAcoustic (BOA) stimulation wherein they use optical forces to generate localised sound and activate the auditory system of zebrafish larvae.

    • Itia A. Favre-Bulle
    • , Michael A. Taylor
    •  & Ethan K. Scott

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The challenge of sensory substitution as a therapeutic approach is to design systems that are well accepted by subjects. Here, in deaf songbirds, the authors substitute hearing with vision, suggesting substitution devices could provide sensory feedback for the key actions that are deprived.

    • Anja T. Zai
    • , Sophie Cavé-Lopez
    •  & Richard H. R. Hahnloser

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