Abstract
The hair bundle is the mechanosensitive organelle that protrudes from the hair cell’s apical surface. Sound in hearing organs, head acceleration in vestibular organs and water flow in the lateral line of fish and amphibians ultimately evoke hair-bundle deflections, to which the hair cell responds by generating an electrical signal. Mechanical-to-electrical transduction, a process that is fast enough to enable the hair cell to respond at auditory frequencies up to ≈100 kHz, most probably results from direct mechanical gating of mechanosensitive ion channels. The hair bundle is more than a passive receptor, a sort of mechanical antenna; this organelle can also convert energy of biochemical origin into mechanical work and thus act as a small engine. The present chapter focuses on active hairbundle motility, as revealed by experiments in in vitro preparations of excised sensory epithelia from the vertebrate ear and on the relevance of motility for the detection of minute oscillatory stimuli by the internal ear.
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