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"Activation of Stem Cells in the Avian Cochlea"

In contrast to mammals, birds replace lost sensory hair cells throughout life and can fully recover from hearing loss. I will describe how we established a hair cell loss model in chickens and used this model to systematically evaluate post-inner-ear-damage transcriptomic changes in the avian inner ear with single-cell RNA-seq. We identified an early stage of gene expression changes in auditory supporting cells, the stem cells that engage in regenerative proliferation, upon hair cell loss. I will introduce this pathway, discuss open questions, and provide insights into how we plan to translate our findings to the mammalian inner ear.