Calculation of impedance from the longitudinal data confirmed that inactivating prestin locally reduced negative damping, an indicator of the cochlear amplification. The
imaginary part of the impedance induced by photoinactivation changed little, which suggests that the selleck compound cochlear amplifier has little effect on the stiffness and mass of the cochlear partition. The vulnerable phase lag beneath the outer hair cells revealed by two-dimensional maps of the traveling wave (Fisher et al., 2012) provided further evidence that the cellular force generated by prestin motors is involved in cochlear amplification (Nilsen and Russell, 1999). Because the somatic motility of the outer hair cells was inactivated by immobilizing prestin motors at precisely defined longitudinal regions, the results from Fisher et al. (2012) demonstrate that an active process overcomes viscous damping to amplify the cochlear traveling wave locally, which consequently results in a maximum response at the BF place. The data also show that amplification occurs over only about one wavelength-long region at the basal side of the BF place, which is only ∼500 μm long under the current experimental condition. In chinchilla, this active region Screening Library is only 2.5% of the total length of the cochlear partition, which is consistent with the spatially restricted
traveling wave measured in sensitive gerbil cochlea (Ren et al., 2011). The longitudinal extent of the cochlear amplification found by Fisher et al. (2012) is significantly smaller than previously thought (de Boer, 1983). Moreover, inside
the amplification region, the local gain increases as the wave approaches the peak. This study thus reveals the spatial relationship between somatic motility of outer hair cells and the cochlear traveling wave, which will advance our understanding of how the forces generated by outer hair cells are coupled to the basilar membrane and boost vibrations induced by soft sounds. Data from the two-dimensional scanning measurements reported by Fisher et al. (2012) provide not only the magnitude and phase patterns of the traveling wave, but also information Rutecarpine for obtaining the volume displacement and velocity, parameters required for quantifying power flow of basilar membrane vibration (Ren and Gillespie, 2007). Several questions remain. As Fisher et al. (2012) point out, the specific contributions of somatic and bundle motility to cochlear amplification remain unclear, as photoinactivation of somatic motility could affect bundle motility (Jia and He, 2005). Moreover, the basilar membrane vibration is highly nonlinear and is sharply tuned; somatic motility shows no nonlinearity or significant tuning at stimulus levels used in vivo. Another mechanism, perhaps hair bundle motility, tunes the basilar membrane.