Project

Peripheral hearing loss is associated with a wide range of dysfunctions along the auditory pathway, from cochlea to cerebral cortex, which worsen with the severity and duration of the hearing impairment. The lack of understanding of these dysfunctions represents a major barrier to achieving optimal hearing rehabilitation, currently done by cochlear implants or in the very next future by gene therapy. Our preliminary results indicate that hearing loss exerts age-dependent effects on previously overlooked parts of the nervous system, impairing the auditory nerve in early life. To decipher the mechanisms involved in the death of neurones of the auditory nerve, we have designed a spatial transcriptomic 10x genomics assay of the auditory nerve neurons in the cochlea and their target nucleus, the cochlear nucleus comparing molecular pathways between hearing mice and deaf mice.