“It is the quest for an understanding of hair cells at a molecular level that drives our research. We would like to understand how hair cells work, why they are vulnerable and why in mammals hair cells do not regenerate.”
“The zebra fish is ideal because you can freeze the entire fish. Normal freezing is not conducted because it would be too slow and cause ice crystals to form.”
“If the cell were a forest, we can now pull out individual trees to study them. We are using virtual reality approaches as they are being developed for the computer gaming industry. Nonetheless, what we eventually want to do is to be able to walk into the forest and explore it in that way.”
“All the proteins look very similar. Without the labeling, it would be like trying to find a specific potato within a couple hundred thousand of them.”
“The holy grail of our research is to convince those cells to regenerate, but now, we need to first understand what the composition of hair cells are and how they develop. We believe that a molecular understanding of the function of hair cells is needed to ultimately prevent hearing loss, and stimulate the regeneration of hair cells in mammals.”
