Issue 264 / December 2023
Sound And Silence
Like smells and tastes, sounds can whizz you back to forgotten places. The shriek of a seagull. The wash of waves. The crack of lightning. A motor's rumble. A Christmas carol. A childhood tune. More often than not, these castaway memories emerge wrapped in a delicate veil of magic. It is a wonderful feeling, of something you would like to know again but cannot, although it is there hidden deep inside you. A feeling we would be unable to remember were it not for our ears. Sound is sensed by way of vibrations that hit parts of our inner ear, an intricate part of mammalian anatomy. Here, vibrations are amplified, causing messages to be relayed to our brain that translates them into noise - which is what the act of hearing is. All sorts of proteins are involved in the perception of sound* but also in its unfortunate contrary: hearing impairment. One particular protein, connexin 26, forms intercellular channels in the cochlea of the inner ear so that molecules can transit from one cell to another. Connexin26 also happens to be involved in many forms of hearing impairment because, when dysfunctional, molecules are no longer able to pass.
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Protein Spotlight (ISSN 1424-4721) is a monthly review written by the
Swiss-Prot team of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
Spotlight articles describe a specific protein or family of proteins on an informal tone. |