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New $1.6 Million NIH/NIDCD Grant Supports Biochemist's Work on Hearing and Balance

April 11, 2016

New $1.6 Million NIH/NIDCD Grant Supports Biochemist's Work on Hearing and Balance

photo of biochemist Marcos Sotomayor

Marcos Sotomayor, assistant professor, chemistry & biochemistry, just received a huge research boost: a five-year, $1,636,250 Research Project (R01) grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

This new grant funds his research group’s work on the “nanomechanics of inner-ear hair-cell transduction” and will allow them to focus on the molecular mechanics of inner-ear tip link proteins essential for hearing and balance.

“Our hearing is particularly valuable and vulnerable, and it relies on a set of specialized and sensitive inner-ear mechanoreceptors called 'hair cells,'” Sotomayor said.

“These hair cells use fine protein filaments called tip links to transform mechanical stimuli from sound into electrical signals for the brain to process. Although tip links are essential for hearing, not much is known about the forces they can withstand or the molecular mechanisms underlying their noise-induced damage. What we do know is that we lose our hearing as we age, as we get exposed to loud sound, and when tip link proteins are modified in several forms of hereditary deafness.”

This grant will allow Sotomayor and his three postdoctoral researchers, nine graduate students and four undergraduate students to focus on elucidating the structure and the mechanics of the tip link filament.

“As the whole filament is very large, we need to look at pieces of it first,” Sotomayor said. “X-ray crystallography allows us to obtain structural models of these pieces, which we can then assemble to study the entire tip link computationally.

“Our overall goal is to determine the strength of tip links under different physiological conditions and when they carry deafness-related mutations. Results will provide a clear molecular view of how tip links function in both normal and impaired hearing.”

Sotomayor came to Ohio State in July 2013. In 2015, he was selected an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Neuroscience and received a Distinguished Undergraduate Research Mentor award from Ohio State’s Office of Undergraduate Research.

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