Related papers: Damping Properties of the Hair Bundle
The detection of sound begins when energy derived from acoustic stimuli deflects the hair bundles atop hair cells. As hair bundles move, the viscous friction between stereocilia and the surrounding liquid poses a fundamental challenge to…
The hair cell's mechanoreceptive organelle, the hair bundle, is highly sensitive because its transduction channels open over a very narrow range of displacements. The synchronous gating of transduction channels also underlies the active…
Direct gating of mechanoelectrical-transduction channels by mechanical force is a basic feature of hair cells that assures fast transduction and underpins the mechanical amplification of acoustic inputs. But the associated nonlinearity -…
Sensory hair cells in auditory and vestibular organs rely on active mechanisms to achieve high sensitivity and frequency selectivity. Recent experimental studies have documented self-sustained oscillations in hair cells of lower vertebrates…
Hair cells actively drive oscillations of their mechanosensitive organelles--the hair bundles that enable hearing and balance sensing in vertebrates. Why and how some hair cells expend energy by sustaining this oscillatory motion in order…
Hair cells, the sensory receptors of the internal ear, subserve different functions in various receptor organs: they detect oscillatory stimuli in the auditory system, but transduce constant and step stimuli in the vestibular and…
Hair cells conduct auditory transduction in vertebrates. In lower vertebrates such as frogs and turtles, due to the active mechanism in hair cells, hair bundles(stereocilia) can be spontaneously oscillating or quiescent. Recently, the…
Hair bundles are biological oscillators that actively transduce mechanical stimuli into electrical signals in the auditory, vestibular, and lateral-line systems of vertebrates. A bundle's function can be explained in part by its operation…
Hair cells of the auditory and vestibular systems are capable of detecting sounds that induce sub-nanometer vibrations of the hair bundle, below the stochastic noise levels of the surrounding fluid. Hair bundles of certain species are also…
The hair cells of the vertebrate inner ear convert mechanical stimuli to electrical signals. Two adaptation mechanisms are known to modify the ionic current flowing through the transduction channels of the hair bundles: a rapid process…
Hair cells of the auditory and vestibular systems display astonishing sensitivity, frequency selectivity, and temporal resolution to external signals. These specialized cells utilize an internal active amplifier to achieve highly sensitive…
We develop a framework for the general interpretation of the stochastic dynamical system near a limit cycle. Such quasi-periodic dynamics are commonly found in a variety of nonequilibrium systems, including the spontaneous oscillations of…
We introduce the concept of self-tuned criticality as a general mechanism for signal detection in sensory systems. In the case of hearing, we argue that active amplification of faint sounds is provided by a dynamical system which is…
Combing hair involves brushing away the topological tangles in a collective curl. Using a combination of experiment and computation, we study this problem that naturally links topology, geometry and mechanics. Observations show that the…
The hair bundle of sensory cells in the vertebrate ear provides an example of a noisy oscillator close to a Hopf bifurcation. The analysis of the data from both spontaneous and forced oscillations shows a strong violation of the…
Cochlear outer hair cells (OHCs) have two mechanosensitive elements: the hair bundle with mechanotrasducer channels and the piezoelectric lateral wall of the cell body. The present report examines how these elements interact with each other…
The inner ear achieves a wide dynamic range of responsiveness by mechanically amplifying weak sounds. The enormous mechanical gain reported for the mammalian cochlea, which exceeds a factor of 4,000, poses a challenge for theory. Here we…
Most sounds of interest consist of complex, time-dependent admixtures of tones of diverse frequencies and variable amplitudes. To detect and process these signals, the ear employs a highly nonlinear, adaptive, real-time spectral analyzer:…
In the ear, hair cells transform mechanical stimuli into neuronal signals with great sensitivity relying on certain active processes. Individual hair cell bundles of non-mammals such as frogs and turtles are known to show spontaneous…
Modelling noisy oscillations of active systems is one of the current challenges in physics and biology. Because the physical mechanisms of such processes are often difficult to identify, we propose a linear stochastic model driven by a…